[4] The Seventeen Provinces arose from the Burgundian Netherlands, a number of fiefs held by the House of Valois-Burgundy and inherited by the Habsburg dynasty in 1482.

When Emperor Charles V, who secularized Prince-Bishopric of Utrecht, began the gradual abdication of his several crowns in October 1555, his son Philip II took over as overlord of the conglomerate of duchies, counties and other feudal fiefs known as the Habsburg Netherlands.

During World War I, the Imperial German army refrained from attacking the Netherlands, and thus relations between the two states were preserved.

The 1914 Septemberprogramm authorized by German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg proposed the creation of a Central European Economic Union, comprising a number of European countries, including Germany and the Netherlands, in which, as the Chancellor secretly stressed, there was to be a semblance of equality among the member states, but in fact it was to be under German leadership to stabilize Germany's economic predominance in Central Europe, with co-author Kurt Riezler admitting that the union would be a veiled form of German domination in Europe (see also: Mitteleuropa).

[8] The Dutch famine of 1944–45, known in the Netherlands as the Hongerwinter (literal translation: hunger winter), was a famine that took place in the German-occupied Netherlands, especially in the densely populated western provinces north of the great rivers, during the winter of 1944–45, near the end of World War II.

[12][13] Germany has an embassy in The Hague and consuls in Amsterdam, Arnhem, Eindhoven, Enschede, Groningen, Leeuwarden, Maastricht, Noord-Beveland, Rotterdam, while the Netherlands has an embassy in Berlin and consuls in Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich and Stuttgart.

According to the official website of the Dutch government, relations between the two are currently "excellent", enjoying "close political, economic, social, cultural, administrative and personal ties".