The German "Westforschung" (Western Research) of the 1920s to 1960s, i.e. the interdisciplinary cross-border study of the region west of the Rhine into Germany's neighbouring countries, has recently become topical within the wider discussion on the contribution of German scholars to National Socialism. Developed after World War I in a defensive stance against French claims on the Rhineland, it later served, intentionally or not, as a (pseudo-)legitimisation for the national-socialist aggression to the west in 1940. The article presents an overview of the northern variant of Westforschung regarding the Low Countries, a special case, not the least because important contributions came from Dutch and Belgian scholars and because this paradigm did not end in 1945 but continued to prevail until the early 1960s.