The name Westland or Westlands may refer to:

Places

Netherlands

New Zealand

This article is about the Nazi propaganda term used for the Netherlands. For other uses, see Westland (disambiguation).

Westland is the name which the government of Nazi Germany intended to replace that of the Netherlands (Dutch: Nederland; German: Niederlande) with during its 1940–45 occupation of that country. The name refers to the fact that the Netherlands lies directly to the west of Germany, hence "the land of the West". Compare Ostmark, the name adopted for Austria after the Anschluss by the Nazi movement.

Nazi race theory stressed the supposed "Aryan" status of the Dutch people (and thus their racial kinship with the Germans themselves), as a result of which the occupying Nazi authorities desired to annex the Netherlands into a greatly enlarged version of the (already-expanded) German Reich, the Greater Germanic Reich. Early political plans proposed transforming the country in its entirety into a Gau Westland, or even a Gau Holland. More detailed plans suggested its outright dissection into five different Gaue, all of which remained unnamed:

Westland (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈʋɛstlɑnt]) is a municipality in the western Netherlands, in the province of South Holland. It covers an area of 90.58 km² (34.97 sq mi) of which 11.05 km² (4.27 sq mi) is covered by water and had a population of 103,716 in 2014.

Towns and other settlements: De Lier, 's-Gravenzande, Monster, Naaldwijk, Wateringen, Heenweg, Honselersdijk, Kwintsheul, Maasdijk, Poeldijk, and Ter Heijde.

History

Westland was created on 1 January 2004 by a merger of the municipalities De Lier, 's-Gravenzande, Monster, Naaldwijk and Wateringen. These are also the names of five of the settlements. The others are Heenweg, Honselersdijk, Kwintsheul, Maasdijk, Poeldijk, and Ter Heijde. Westland itself is not the name of a settlement or town, but rather of the region. The City hall is located in the middle of Westland, in Naaldwijk, the second largest settlement in Westland.

The town of Honselersdijk also possesses the largest Flower Auction, FloraHolland, which also has a location in Rijnsburg. This is a very important sector of the Westland economy. Flowers produced in Westland are sold all over the world.