The Saar Protectorate was a German borderland territory twice temporarily made a protectorate state. Since rejoining Germany the second time in 1957, it is the smallest Federal German Area State (Flächenland), the Saarland, not counting the city-states Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen. It is named after the Saar River.

After World War I and World War II, the state was forcibly made a protectorate by the victorious allies as part of a policy of "industrial disarmament" and re-settlement of peoples mandated on the new German governments. The Saar protectorate was a short lived post-World War II protectorate (1947–56) partitioned from defeated Nazi Germany; it was administered by the French Fourth Republic.

The region about the Saar River and its tributary valleys is a geographically folded, mineral rich, ethnically German, economically important, heavily industrialized area. It possesses a well-developed transportation infrastructure that was one of the centres of the Industrial Revolution in Germany and which, like the Ruhr Area, fuelled the German war industries from during the early 19th century to the end of World War II. Like the nearby Ruhr valley, it was heavily bombed by the allies as part of the strategic bombing campaigns.