German companies from supplying Iraq with arms and poison gas plants. Following Hans-Dietrich Genscher’s resignation, Lambsdorff and Chancellor Helmut Kohl named Irmgard Schwaetzer, a former aide to Genscher, to be the new Foreign Minister. In a surprise decision, however, a majority of the FDP parliamentary group rejected her nomination and voted instead to name Justice Minister Klaus Kinkel to head the Foreign Ministry. Life after politics After resigning from active politics, Lambsdorff remained an advocate of free markets, becoming an active figure in the DSW shareholder action group, and regularly warned about the dangers of growing bureaucracy and tax burdens. From 1993 until 2008, he served on the supervisory board of Lufthansa. In 1999 Lambsdorff was appointed as the federal envoy to the negotiations for the compensation of the victims of forced labor in Germany during World War II by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, which led to the establishment of the Foundation "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future". He also served as a member of the scientific advisory board of the Centre Against Expulsions and a jury member of the Franz Werfel Human Rights Award. Lambsdorff was honorary president of the Liberal International. In this capacity, he personally delivered the World Association of Newspapers' Golden Pen of Freedom Award to Kenyan human rights activist Gitobu Imanyara in 1992, who was banned by his country's authorities from leaving the country. Political positions The pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP) had been in coalition with the social democratic SPD, but changed direction in the early 1980s. Lambsdorff led the FDP to adopt the market-oriented "Kiel Theses" in 1977; it rejected the Keynesian emphasis on consumer demand, and proposed to reduce social welfare spending, and try to introduce policies to stimulate production and facilitate jobs. Lambsdorff argued that the result would be economic growth, which would itself solve both the social problems and the financial problems. As a consequence switched allegiance to the CDU, and Schmidt lost his parliamentary majority in 1982. For the only time in West Germany's history, the government fell on a vote of no confidence. Family The Lambsdorff family is of old Westphalian aristocratic descent, but settled for centuries in the Baltic countries and was hence closely connected to Tsarist and Imperial Russia (see Baltic Germans). Lambsdorff's father served as a tsarist cadet in St. Petersburg and the former Russian foreign minister Vladimir Lambsdorff is one of his relatives. Between 2004 and 2017,