Countries are grammatically feminine in a lot of languages, and this is occasionally transferred to English when people want to sound pretensious.
Countries are feminine in a lot of languages but they are typically not in German, even though some exeptions are.
Broadly speaking countries are neutral in German. So technically it is:
das Deutschland
das Dänemark
das Frankreich
das England
etc.
Note that this defies German principle regarding grammatical gender in some cases. It is "das Land", so those make sense, but it is also "die Mark". We would never get the idea to call it "die Dänemark" though.
However since we find this sounds a bit odd we refer to all those countries (some 90% of all countries probably) without using the article roughly 99% of the time.
There are exceptions though, countries that are either feminine or (even rarer) maskuline (and with those we usually
do use the article):
die Türkei
die Ukraine
der Sudan
der Kongo
The whole thing get's even weirder once you get into regions and other geogrphical phenomena rather than nation states.
There is actually (at least some
) etymological sense to this, but getting into this would make this long answer even longer and i couldn't do it of the top of my head but would have to read up on it to a fair extent and we can't have that, can we?
Anyway... countries in German: Usually not feminine but neutral.
(Btw: "Die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika" are plural in German and there is ab-so-lute-ly no way to make them singular, not even when using the acronym.
That's the reason why some of us (i am sooo guilty) keep referring to them in plural when speaking or writing in English even though we know that Americans typically refer to them as singular.)
In British English, it's reasonably common - 'Britain and her Colonies', for example.
In German we would say:
Britannien and seine Kolonien (-> das Britannien, n.)
There are personifications of nations though and it's technically possible to use those in that context.
You could say:
Britannia und ihre Kolonien. (-> die Britannia (via Latin), f.)
The problem is: You wouldn't. Unless you are a very snooty person stepping out of a time machine from the nineteenhundreds.
The point is the discrepancy between fatherland and her empire - it's a bit odd, but 'Fatherland and his empire' would have been totally wrong.
That
is the point.
In German it would be - grammatically -
the fatherland [takes stuff] into its empire. But nobody would ever say the original sentence that sparked the question.
There are phrases where it is possible to use it as the subject of an active sentence, but that's somewhat atypical.
People would typically not say "so the fatherland invaded that other place" even though it's possible to do so. It just sounds odd.
Would the answer be that "Fatherland" is "land of fathers" while the land remains feminine, or is the direct translation that the land itself is the "father?"
In todays German that is ambiguous. Technically it is neither of the above but an entirely new word. Etymologically the idea once was "the father's land" as in the land your father owned, had husbandry of, lived in or whatever.
Today the word is pregnant with all the possibilities you speculated about, though.
I know that in Latin father land is Patria, which is really just a feminine adjective describing something as belonging to one's paternal ancestors. It is usually implied that the feminine thing it describes is terra, meaning the land, but the adjective could be used for other things.
Using a feminine pronoun for fatherland seems right to me.
Believe me: German grammatical gender has extremely little to do with what feels right to you, at least as long you base your feeling on Latin.
We do have inherited
some tendencies for applying grammatical Gender from Latin, like most immaterial concepts being feminine (die Freiheit, die Würde etc.). But for the most part grammatical gender in German works remarkably different than in romance languages.
I think another part is that Germany tends to be viewed as a fairly masculine country, most heavily associated with industry and war without any well known personification (the most recognizable would be World War propaganda), like Britannia that gives Britain a feminine quality that Germany lacks. Of course, in North America it is standard to use femine pronouns when personifying an inanimate object (i.e. cars and ships are almost always "she").
This is all speaking from a Canadian perspective.
Well, we do have (or at least had - it's a bit out of use by now) such a personification.
Germania - of course.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germania_(personification)
That doesn't entirely preclude the somewhat masculine character that you diagnosed. I mean, really, those...
...do look a bit... let's say more dykeish than the one's Leoreth posted.
Anywho...bottom line regarding the original question:
"...the Fatherland taking the Netherlands into her empire."
I very much doubt any German ever said that (in German). It's probably bogus entirely made up on the English side of the equasion, either because it's an English show in the first place or because it's a very, very, very loose translation.
Besides: The implication of that phrase is that the Netherlands were part of the fatherland in some way, which i doubt anybody believed in 1905.
(It's late at night and I'm feeling a lot more paranoid than I normally am right now. 
