Background
Posselt was born in Pforzheim, Baden-Württemberg.
Posselt was born in Pforzheim, Baden-Württemberg.
In 1998 he became president of the Paneuropa-Union Deutschland, the German branch of the International Paneuropean Union. Posselt is the leading German advocate of the rights of those Germans whose ancestors lived in the Sudetenland area of Bohemia as well as Moravia and who were expelled by the Potsdam conference and the governments in Central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War. Posselt is respected in the Sudeten German community and in his home state of Bavaria.
The conservative Bavarian government has often supported the Sudeten German community, and was among those demanding that the Czechoslovakian Republic should repeal the Beneš decrees before being allowed into European Union.
His main goal - and the principal aim of the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft that he has led since 2000 - is to revoke the so-called Beneš decrees, as well as other acts of the post-war expulsions that were meant to punish the German population in the Sudetenland as a whole for its prevailing support of Nazism.
He has been a Member of the European Parliament from 1994 to 2014.