in Germany and in late 1933 she set up an Anglo-German Study Group, whose chairman was Lord Allen and which Lothian was a founding member. Through the study group, Lothian met Philip Conwell-Evans, a "rather shadowy" British historian who was to serve as his main contact with the Nazi regime. Lothian was close to the South African politician Jan Christian Smuts, and like Smuts he thought the Treaty of Versailles was too harsh while also tending to think in terms of the British empire rather than Britain. Like Smuts, Lothian was mainly concerned about the possibility of a German-Japanese alliance, which might bring down the British empire, leading Lothian to write: " We must prevent a Japanese-German combination, which will be fatal. And this can only be done by ceasing to treat Germany as a pariah in Europe". Through Lothian wrote in 1933 "like most Liberals, I loathe the Nazi regime", but also felt that "the first condition to reform it is that we should be willing to do justice to Germany". In a speech delivered in Nottingham on Armistice Day 1933 Lothian declared that "in part, at any rate, that [Nazi] regime is the product of our own conduct". Lothian claimed that Nazi Germany did not want to "incorporate other races into itself.... [Nazism is a] national movement against internal disunity". He also claimed that the Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance was encircling Germany and that, deprived of an alliance with Austria-Hungary, the Polish corridor and many of its pre-1914 fortresses, Germany was weakened strategically and had good reason to pursue rearmament. Nazi repression of domestic enemies, Jews and Social Democrats, was in Lothian's view "largely the reflex of the external persecution to which Germans have been subjected since the war". He favoured a meeting between Hitler and the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and for British policy to be less pro-French, and he claimed that the League of Nations could not be restored unless Germany was given "a square deal in Central Europe". In January 1935, he went to Germany as the general secretary of the Rhodes Society, where he met Philip Conwell-Evans, a pro-Nazi British historian who lectured on German history at the University of Königsberg in Königsberg (modern Kaliningrad, Russia). Conwell-Evans was an associate of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the special Ambassador-At-Large, and through him Lothian met Ribbentrop. Through Ribbentrop, Lothian was able to meet Hitler on