Leaving aside the differences between annexation and the various forms of trusteeship, Western European countries did have some notions of carving up German territory.

The USSR in 1945 was not the only party who conceived of expanding their territory at defeated Germany's expense. The Benelux countries all had various schemes to annex German territory on the borders on the pretext that this territory was not truly German and that such territory wold be compensation for wartime German occupation. The various Dutch Bakker-Schut Plans envisioned a wide expansion of the Dutch state into northwestern Germany. It is unclear whether or not the Bakker-Schut plan was a serious proposal or a ploy to wring more reparations from the defeated Germany, but Dutch troops did occupy some territory and were able to gain some leverage to gain minor border corrections. Belgium and Luxembourg also floated annexation schemes, although not as far-reaching as Bakker-Schut, and these followed a similar pattern of declarations and tentative occupations that were soon shot down by the Allied Control Council and a period of limbo in which these territories were in dispute until they were largely settled in West Germany's favor in the treaties signed in the mid-1950s.

One of the crucial differences between territorial revision in the Eastern Germany versus Western Germany was that the preeminent military power in the West, the US, was against it, while the Soviets were not. The American military government (OMGUS) quite quickly recognized that a strong Germany was in America's interest in fighting the emerging Cold War and OMGUS often threw cold water on any plans to dismember the western zones. Moreover, the refugee crisis created by expelling many German and Volksdeutsche from Eastern Europe made OMGUS officials very reluctant to create another internal refugee crisis in their own zone by sanctioning Western European annexations.

The importance of the US in putting a brake on this matter was reflected in the only Western-based partition schemes that gained a semblance of traction: those entertained by France. Unlike Luxembourg, or even the Netherlands, France was a major European power and one of the four governing Allied bodies of Germany. France was naturally able to reverse the Third Reich's annexation of Alsace-Lorraine and return the territories to France, but it also toyed with the idea of setting up a Saar protectorate in the Saarland that would be independent from the German state and under the protection of France. The French occupation zones also promoted policies that encouraged local particularism. For example, the French occupation government forbade direct connections between political parties in their zone from other German parties in either the British or American zones. French censorship of political papers tended to hew towards promoting language that emphasized the region's larger separateness from Germany. All of these policies led to a charge by German politicians in the British and American zones that the French occupation was a stalking horse for De Gaulle's plan for "Rhenania," a separate state on the Rhine that would be Franco-centric and bilingual.

Whatever these French plans were, neither the US nor the newly formed West German government was willing to countenance either Rhenania or even a Saar protectorate. Adenauer saw though that settling these claims was an opportunity for the FRG to reestablish diplomatic normalcy, and he pursued a policy of negotiation that framed settling these territorial claims with France and the Benelux countries not as a victory for Germany, but rather as a victory for Western European integration. Such framing not only covered a lot of domestic bases for Adenauer, but it was in keeping with the US State Department's vision of Western European cooperation to face the Soviet threat.

At some point during the war, all of the Allied powers toyed with schemes to dismember Germany and remove it as a future threat. A punitive approach to territorial revision was a position that had a good deal of popular support in the West, especially among those countries occupied by Germany. But of the Allies, only the USSR and its satellite state allies were able to make these revision schemes a reality. This type of territorial revision entailed expulsions and ethnic cleansing and given that most of the expellees ended up in the Western zones, the Soviets did not have to contend with feeding or caring for the victims of revision. In contrast, the Western Allies did have a massive refugee problem, and that made them quite reluctant to sanction a similar revision on Germany's western border. More displaced Germans was the last thing OMGUS wanted, especially since it soon decided that getting Germany back on its feet was in America's interests. Even France, which pursued the idea of Western revision longer than other Western European states, did not want to annex the Rhine borders to France, but create a protectorate of sorts. The net result was that whatever territorial revision that occurred in the West, outside of Alsace-Lorraine, was largely invisible on most maps as it involved minor tidying up of the border and FRG pledges to support bilingualism in border areas.

Sources

Demshuk, Andrew. The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945-1970. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Granieri, Ronald J. The Ambivalent Alliance: Konrad Adenauer, the CDU/CSU, and the West, 1949-1966. New York: Berghahn Books, 2002.

Lewkowicz, Nicolas. The German Question and the International Order, 1943-48. Basingstoke, Hampshire [England]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

MacDonogh, Giles. After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation. New York: Basic Books, 2007.