When, several decades after Carlo Schmid's impassioned plea, the Germans were confronted with the question of war, they seemed to follow his lead. They seemed to want nothing to do with war. Many objected strongly to the 1991 Gulf War; thousands took to the streets. Most prominently, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher asserted that war could not under any circumstances be a means of politics, a view that was shared by opposition politicians. This forceful rejection of war in general and the Gulf War in particular was often illustrated, underlined and justified with references to and memories of the Second World War. In his statement on the Gulf War Chancellor Helmut Kohl mentioned, first of all, the Germans' experiences of war, their memories and their resulting ability to understand the suffering of people caught up in war. These experiences, Kohl asserted, ‘have been deeply ingrained in the memory of our people as a whole’. Later, when the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) had to decide whether the country would itself use military force, the Second World War became a common point of reference in the debate.