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From hot tea on a small Danish train station to global humanitarian aid

The story of the Danish Refugee Council begun as a grassroots movement that welcomed Hungarian refugees in 1956 - an initiative originally intended to dissolve once its task was complete. 70 years later, the Danish Refugee Council is Denmark’s largest humanitarian organisation and a leading international organisation.

On a cold November night in 1956, a train pulled into Padborg Station after a two-day journey from Vienna. It was filled with Hungarians fleeing the Soviet invasion. They were met by musicians playing Hungarian folk songs and by volunteers passing cups of hot tea and pastries through the train windows.

Grainy black-and-white photos from that night show faces framed in the train windows: smiles, headscarves, small children bundled in wool. The atmosphere captured the values that would later come to define the organisation.

Only days earlier, the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs had convened a number of civil society organisations and asked them to take on the task of receiving the Hungarian refugees.

Together they founded the Danish Refugee Council, a temporary umbrella organization that was meant to wind down once the immediate needs had been met. Reality, however, turned out to be quite different

From Danish reception to international actor

In its early years, the organisation worked exclusively with Hungarian refugees, soon expanded to support others fleeing the communist regimes of the Eastern Bloc.

The core idea from the beginning was holistic: to support refugees from arrival to an independent life. This led to broad integration efforts in Denmark and a gradual expansion into work beyond the country’s borders.

As early as 1960, the Danish Refugee Council began assisting refugees in Germany and Austria.

The world changed dramatically throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Wars and conflicts erupted, and the world witnessed several major international refugee crises: Afghanistan, Chile, Iran, Iraq, Vietnam - to name only a few. As displacement grew in scale and complexity, so too did the need for humanitarian assistance.

An international breakthrough

With the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the DRC became a key actor both in Denmark and globally.

More than 17,000 Bosnian refugees arrived in the country, and the organisation assumed responsibility for activation programmes, repatriation, and later, integration. In 1992, DRC’s first international office, in Zagreb, opened, and in the years that followed DRC became the largest provider of humanitarian assistance in the region.

Convoys filled with relief supplies drove through war-torn areas, and collection boxes shaped like trucks became a symbol of Denmark’s direct support to the Balkans.

A new direction for Danish Refugee Council

At the end of the 1990s, Danish municipalities took over responsibility for integration of refugees in Denmark. This cost the DRC almost 80 percent of its public funding and resulted in significant cutbacks.

The organisation chose a new strategy: to continue its national work within the asylum system, to bid for municipal integration contracts, and to significantly expand its volunteer engagement.

At the same time, DRC aimed to strengthen its international footprint - far more ambitiously than before.

“The Complete Game”

Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, DRC expanded rapidly, operating in more than 40 countries. The organisation combined humanitarian relief, mine clearance, protection, development work, and integration initiatives, and in 2015 it was ranked the world’s third-best humanitarian organization.

This holistic model – from crisis to self-reliance - became known as “The Complete Game.”

When war broke out in Syria, DRC was already present in the country, so it became the first international NGO granted permission to assist internally displaced people inside the country. Meanwhile, work continued at home in Denmark with asylum counselling, integration programmes, and a large volunteer force.

Years of Deep Change

Looking back over the past decade, the Danish Refugee Council has continued to operate in a world marked by massive displacement and increasingly complex crises. In 2022, millions of Ukrainians crossed into neighbouring countries.

DRC responded with humanitarian aid, legal assistance, and protection in Ukraine, in neighbouring countries, and in Denmark, where thousands of Ukrainians sought safety.

Humanitarian relief, long-term programmes, strong partnership with local NGOs and communities, and climate-related initiatives shaped the Danish Refugee Council’s global work when, in 2025, one of the historical pillars of the international humanitarian system was abruptly removed.

The United States and several European countries drastically reduced their humanitarian funding, and the consequences for the Danish Refugee Council were dramatic: A global wave of cutbacks forced DRC and other humanitarian organisations to close projects and scale down activities across all regions. Worldwide, DRC had to reduce its workforce by almost one fifth - a downsizing that hit at a time of rising global needs.

Thus, the Danish Refugee Council now faces a paradox shared by the entire humanitarian sector: needs are greater than ever, while resources are dwindling. Yet the mission remains unchanged. From Ukraine to Sudan, from Afghanistan to Denmark, the DRC continues to uphold the promise born on that platform in Padborg Station in 1956, to protect, advocate for, and enable sustainable futures for those forced to flee.