Bakker-Schut Plan

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The Bakker-Schut Plan. To the left is the Netherlands, to the right is the part of Germany known as Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia. The coloured areas in the middle are the parts proposed for annexation by the Netherlands.
The Bakker-Schut Plan. To the left is the Netherlands, to the right is the part of Germany known as Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia. The coloured areas in the middle are the parts proposed for annexation by the Netherlands.

The Bakker-Schut Plan was proposed by the Netherlands after the end of World War II. It entailed giving the Netherlands huge monetary reparations from Germany and included the annexation of part of Germany, in its most ambitious form even including the cities of Cologne, Aachen, Münster and Osnabrück, that would have enlarged the country by 30 to 50 percent. The local population had to be either deported, or, when still speaking the original Low German dialects, dutchified. The name of the plan is derived from the commission member charged with working out the details. The plan was largely dropped after U.S. dismissal of it. Many Germans living in the Netherlands were however declared 'enemy subjects' and put into a concentration camp in an operation called Black Tulip. A total of 3,691 Germans were ultimately deported. The U.S. responded by expelling several thousand Dutch subjects living in the Allied occupation zones.

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The large scale annexation was in 1947 rejected by the Allied High Commission, on the grounds that Germany already contained 14,000,000 refugees from the annexations in the east, and that the remaining territory could not handle more refugees.

The London conference of April 23, 1949, did however permit some less far-reaching border modifications. At 12 o'clock of the very same day, Dutch troops occupied an area of 69 km2, the largest parts of which were Elten (near Emmerich am Rhein) and Selfkant. At that time, these areas were inhabited by a total of almost 10,000 people.

This territory was returned to Germany on August 1, 1963, except one small hill near Wyler village, called Duivelsberg/Wylerberg which was annexed by Netherlands.

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