his position in the House of Lords to argue in favour of amendments to the Trust. He advocated permitting individuals to bequest country homes and estates to the Trust allowing descendants to avoid death duties. This led to a huge expansion of country homes being obtained by the National Trust known as the Country Houses Scheme. On his death Lothian bequeathed his Norfolk country home Blickling Hall to the National Trust. Enthusiast for Nazi Germany Lothian believed that Germany had been treated unfairly and harshly by the Treaty of Versailles and, after its signing, he became a steadfast advocate of revising the Treaty in Germany's favour throughout the 1920s until March 1939, a policy known as appeasement. Claud Cockburn claimed Lothian was part of the Cliveden set of appeasers, and cartoonist David Low drew him as one of the "Shiver Sisters" dancing to Adolf Hitler's tune. For his commitment to appeasement, some called him "Lord Loathsome." Speaking on 24 June 1933, at Gresham's School, Lothian said, "There probably never was a time of more uncertainty in the world than today. Every kind of political and economic philosophy is seeking approbation, and there is every kind of uncertainty about social and personal habits". The British historian Richard Griffiths made a distinction between appeasers, a term that he reserved for government officials who believed in appeasement of the Axis states for a variety of reasons, many quite pragmatic, and the enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, which he described a group of upper-class individuals who acting on their own as private citizens sought better relations with the Third Reich, usually for ideological reasons. Griffins defined Lothian as an enthusiast for Nazi Germany rather than an appeaser, noting his actions were undertaken as those of a private citizen who found much that was admirable about Nazi Germany. Lothian as part of his anti-Versailles lobbying had come into contact in the 1920s with Dr. Margarete Gartner of the Rheinische Frauenliga. Gartner was one of the leading promoters of the "Black Horror on the Rhine" story, which was intended to discredit both the Treaty of Versailles and France in particular. The "Black Horror on the Rhine" allegations-despite being mostly false-had done much to shift British sympathies away from France, which was accused of letting Senegalese soldiers engage in gross sexual violence against German women in the Rhineland, and towards Germany. Gartner continued to serve the new regime