Bernd Posselt (born 4 June 1956 in Pforzheim) is a German politician, who served as a Member of the European Parliament from 1994 to 2014, representing the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) and the European People's Party (EPP). He is currently a member of the executive board of the CSU.
Posselt was born in Pforzheim, Baden-Württemberg as a son of expellees. [1] He was a Member of the European Parliament from 1994 to 2014. [2] 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. 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.
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 Czech Republic should repeal the Beneš decrees before being allowed into European Union.
The Christian Social Union in Bavaria is a Christian democratic and conservative political party in Germany. Having a regionalist identity, the CSU operates only in Bavaria while its larger counterpart, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), operates in the other fifteen states of Germany. It differs from the CDU by being somewhat more conservative in social matters, following Catholic social teaching. The CSU is considered the de facto successor of the Weimar-era Catholic Bavarian People's Party.
The Sudetenland is the historical German name for the northern, southern, and western areas of former Czechoslovakia which were inhabited primarily by Sudeten Germans. These German speakers had predominated in the border districts of Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia since the Middle Ages. Since the 9th century the Sudetenland had been an integral part of the Czech state both geographically and politically.
The Munich Agreement was an agreement concluded at Munich on 30 September 1938, by Nazi Germany, Great Britain, the French Republic, and Fascist Italy. The agreement provided for the German annexation of part of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland, where more than three million people, mainly ethnic Germans, lived. The pact is also known in some areas as the Munich Betrayal, because of a previous 1924 alliance agreement and a 1925 military pact between France and the Czechoslovak Republic.
The military occupation of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany began with the German annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938, continued with the creation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and by the end of 1944 extended to all parts of Czechoslovakia.
The Republicans is a national conservative political party in Germany. The primary plank of the programme is opposition to immigration. The party tends to attract protest voters who think that the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union of Bavaria (CSU) are not sufficiently conservative. It was founded in 1983 by former CSU members Franz Handlos and Ekkehard Voigt, and Franz Schönhuber was the party's leader from 1985 to 1994. The party had later been led by Rolf Schlierer, until 2014. The Republicans had seats in the European Parliament between 1989 and 1994, Abgeordnetenhaus of West Berlin in 1989–1990 and in the parliament of the German state of Baden-Württemberg between 1991 and 2001.
Konrad Ernst Eduard Henlein was a Sudeten German politician in Czechoslovakia prior to World War II. After Germany invaded Czechoslovakia he became the Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter of Reichsgau Sudetenland under the occupation of Nazi Germany.
The Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft is an organization representing Sudeten German expellees and refugees from the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Most of them were forcibly expelled and deported to western Allied occupation zones of Germany, which would later form West Germany, from their homelands inside Czechoslovakia during the expulsion of Germans after World War II.
Markus Ferber is a German engineer and politician who has been serving as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) since 1994. He is a member of the Christian Social Union, part of the European People's Party. In addition to his parliamentary work, Ferber has been serving as president of the Hanns Seidel Foundation (HSS) since 2020.
Anja Weisgerber is a German lawyer and politician. She currently is a member of the German Bundestag representing Schweinfurt for the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU), part of the European People's Party (EPP). She previously served as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for Bavaria. In addition to her political work, she serves as of counsel at the Frankfurt office of German law firm GSK Stockmann & Kollegen.
The Beneš decrees were a series of laws drafted by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in the absence of the Czechoslovak parliament during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in World War II. They were issued by President Edvard Beneš from 21 July 1940 to 27 October 1945 and retroactively ratified by the Interim National Assembly of Czechoslovakia on 6 March 1946.
German Bohemians, later known as Sudeten Germans, were ethnic Germans living in the Czech lands of the Bohemian Crown, which later became an integral part of Czechoslovakia. Before 1945, over three million German Bohemians constituted about 23% of the population of the whole country and about 29.5% of the population of Bohemia and Moravia. Ethnic Germans migrated into the Kingdom of Bohemia, an electoral territory of the Holy Roman Empire, from the 11th century, mostly in the border regions of what was later called the "Sudetenland", which was named after the Sudeten Mountains.
Horst Lorenz Seehofer is a German politician who served as Minister for the Interior, Building and Community under Chancellor Angela Merkel from 2018 to 2021. A member of the Christian Social Union (CSU), he served as the 18th minister-president of Bavaria from 2008 to 2018 and Leader of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria from 2008 to 2019.
The Egerland is a historical region in the far north west of Bohemia in what is today the Czech Republic, at the border with Germany. It is named after the German name Eger for the town of Cheb and the main river Ohře.
The First Czechoslovak Republic, often colloquially referred to as the First Republic, was the first Czechoslovak state that existed from 1918 to 1938, a union of ethnic Czechs and Slovaks. The country was commonly called Czechoslovakia, a compound of Czech and Slovak; which gradually became the most widely used name for its successor states. It was composed of former territories of Austria-Hungary, inheriting different systems of administration from the formerly Austrian and Hungarian territories.
The expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia after World War II was part of a series of evacuations and deportations of Germans from Central and Eastern Europe during and after World War II.
Czech–German relations are the relationship between Germany and the Czech Republic. The two countries share 815 km of common borders and both are members of the European Union, NATO, OECD, OSCE, Council of Europe and the World Trade Organization.
Walter Becher was a German Bohemian politician, representative of the All-German Bloc/League of Expellees and Deprived of Rights (GB/BHE), All German Party (GDP) and the Christian Social Union of Bavaria.
Martin Kastler is a German politician of the Christian Social Union of Bavaria (CSU) who was a Member of the European Parliament from 2003 until 2004 and from 2009 until 2014.
Bernd Fabritius is a German lawyer and politician of the Christian Social Union of Bavaria (CSU) who has served as a Member of the Bundestag from 2013 to 2017 and again in 2021.
Ulrich Lange is a German lawyer and politician of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) who has been serving as a member of the Bundestag from the state of Bavaria since 2009.
Media related to Bernd Posselt at Wikimedia Commons
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