Westland is the name with which the government of Nazi Germany intended to replace that of the Netherlands (Dutch: Nederland; German: Niederlande) during its 1940–45 occupation of the country.
[3] More detailed plans suggested its outright dissection into five different Gaue, all of which remained unnamed:[4] During this period the name was also adopted by the Nazis for, amongst others: In a wider political context the term was also prominently used by a number of Nazi scholars in the above-mentioned Westland journal to describe the entire frontier area between Central Europe (the "Germanic world") and Western Europe (France and Great Britain), which they referred to as the Westland.
This region was considered to be bounded by the watersheds of the Meuse and the Seine rivers in the west and that of the Rhine in the east.
[8] It was further purported that England subsequently tried to exploit Franco-German hostility by turning the area into "an instrument in its balance of power politics".
[8] It was thus deemed that one of Nazi Germany's main purposes in the present conflict would be to "restore the Westland for all time to its position dictated by natural law as the Westmark of the Germanic center of Europe", and to "once again take up its watch" at the mouths of the Rhine, the Meuse, and the Scheldt rivers.