Mogens Fog – resistance hero and minister in the immediate post-liberation government of Denmark – had a clear message for his compatriots: while Denmark had survived five years of German occupation relatively unscathed, the Netherlands had been ransacked, and the Danes had a moral obligation to come to their rescue. Apparently, this feeling was widespread in Denmark, as it was in many other countries at the time. In the first year after liberation, the Danish charity Hollands Hjælpen campaigned to raise funds for the impoverished Dutch. Through posters, brochures and exhibitions, it portrayed a nation ravaged by bombardments, its population decimated by starvation and – last but not least – its great stretches of farmland swallowed by the North Sea. Going quite beyond Mogens Fog's call for solidarity, Hollands Hjælpen even went so far as to claim that through their suffering, the Dutch had made an important contribution to the Allied war effort and that the Danes had nothing but a debt of honour to come to the aid of their southern brethren.

And so they did. In late 1946, Hollands Hjælpen proudly reported that it had already raised millions of kroner and collected 200,000 pieces of cutlery, over 2000 kettles and 43,384 pairs of used shoes for the destitute Dutch. In a joint effort with the Red Barnet child-aid organization, hundreds of Dutch children from the worst affected households were taken in by Danish families in order to reinvigorate them. Many of these children returned after a few months in much improved health and laden with goods and gifts, tokens of the hospitality and generosity of their Danish foster parents. Even today, many rural Danes can recount the stories of the impoverished Dutch children who temporarily moved in with families in the countryside. A Danish woman who was a child herself at the time told this author how a Dutch girl had arrived in her village, emaciated and bald. She was later told that the girl's hair had fallen out because she had had to survive the war on a diet of old newspapers.