International Committee of the Red Cross camps, organizing relief assistance for civilian populations, and administering the exchange of messages regarding prisoners and missing persons. By the end of the war, 179 delegates had conducted 12,750 visits to POW camps in 41 countries. The Central Information Agency on Prisoners-of-War ("Zentralauskunftsstelle für Kriegsgefangene") had a staff of 3,000, the card index tracking prisoners contained 45 million cards, and 120 million messages were exchanged by the Agency. One major obstacle was that the Nazi-controlled German Red Cross refused to cooperate with the Geneva statutes including blatant violations such as the deportation of Jews from Germany and the mass murders
Theresienstadt concentration camp and the Red Cross Theresienstadt concentration camp and the Red Cross Theresienstadt was used by the Schutzstaffel (SS) as a "show camp" for fooling Red Cross representatives about the ongoing Holocaust and the Nazi plan to murder all Jews. The Nazified German Red Cross visited the camp in 1943 and filed the only accurate report on the camp, describing overcrowding and undernourishment. In 1944, the camp was "beautified" in preparation for a delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Danish government. The delegation visited on 23 June; ICRC delegate Maurice Rossel wrote a favorable report on the camp and