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Germany advanced to the coasts very quickly in WWII. They forced the evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940. From mid-1940, the Germans were all the way to the French coast. You could see England from Calais. Operation Barbarossa wasn't even launched for another full year, so they weren't preoccupied on the Eastern Front.
Being that close with a lot of armor, and given Germany's momentum at this point in the war, I have to imagine that they were preparing D-Day style invasion plans of Great Britain.
Is that the case? I haven't seen anything online to indicate that such a plan was ever made. What were the proposed landing places? The famous Cliffs of Dover wouldn't have been easy to get through, but it seems like at either Deal or Folkestone the land would have been easier to cross.
What was the plan? If there was no plan, why not? What were they preoccupied with?
The Germans did have such a plan, named Operation Sea Lion. There were several iterations of the plan, starting from June 1940. This first plan called for landings along a very broad front, running from the Lyme Bay in the west to Ramsgate in the east. However, the German navy, the Kriegsmarine, was unhappy with this plan, as it didn't feel it could support or escort such an invasion. Over time, the plan evolved into a more limited assault on Kent and Sussex, including landings around Folkestone. Ultimately, however, the attack would be cancelled. The failure of the Luftwaffe to win air superiority over Southern England was a key reason for this. Another reason was that the Kriegsmarine was vastly outnumbered by the Royal Navy - in its Nore Command (one of the four Commands in home waters), the RN had 32 destroyers, compared to just 10 for the entire Kriegsmarine. The German Army had no experience with amphibious assaults, and no real idea how difficult they were. Finally, the Germans were struggling to find enough shipping to carry troops without using boats and barges desperately needed on inland waterways by German industry. I've written more about the plan here and here, about the British plans to defend against it here and about a wargame of the plan I took part in here and here.
