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
International Committee of the Red Cross during an armed conflict was adopted by the International Red Cross Conference. Unfortunately, most governments had little interest in implementing this convention, and it was thus prevented from entering into force before the beginning of World War II. In the Interwar period, Bolivia and Paraguay were disputing possession of the Gran Chaco - a desert region between the two countries. The dispute escalated into a full-scale conflict in 1932. During the war the ICRC visited 18,000 Bolivian prisoners of war and 2,500 Paraguayan detainees. With the help of the ICRC both countries made improvements to the conditions of the detainees.