It was located in a remote area on the banks of the river Digul, in what is now Boven Digoel Regency in South Papua, Indonesia.

The camp was originally opened to exiled communists after the failed 1926 uprisings in Java and Sumatra; at its largest extent in 1930 it held around 1300 internees and 700 family members.

[4] De Graeff thought that a formal trial would give them a platform to spread their message, and decided that these should be exiled, ideally all to the same place.

[3] By early December, a site at Boven-Digoel in an isolated part of Papua was identified as an ideal place for the mass exile by Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL) Captain Theo Becking, who had led the repression of the uprising in Java.

[10] The Danish travel writer Aage Krarup Nielsen was allowed to sail on the monthlong trip with this first group of exiles.

[11] More boatloads of internees and their families continued to arrive throughout the year, and M. A. Monsjou, a civil servant who had been Controller at Fakfak replaced Becking as administrator at the end of October.

[13] Forced labour was used at first, but quickly abandoned when camp authorities decided that internees were willing to work hard voluntarily to improve their living situation.

The liberal Dutch journalist Marcus van Blankenstein was allowed to visit the camp; his scathing articles in the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant in the fall of 1928 suggested that innocent people had been imprisoned there without charge, and that sanitary conditions were so poor (especially in the Tanah Tinggi camp) that people were dying "like rats during a plague".

[10] By 1929 the detainees in Tanah Merah were living in six "hamlets" made up of shacks with tin roofs; the original barracks were dismantled.

[2] Internees generally settled along ethnic lines, with Sumatrans, Javanese, Madurese, and people from Banten (where the 1926 revolt had been centered) living in their own sections.

[9] So, many complained to newspapers; one former journalist, Lie Eng Hok, wrote a letter to his former paper Sin Po in 1929 about worsening conditions, which was translated and reprinted in the Dutch press.

[10] In his final report he said that roughly two thirds of the 600 internees he interviewed should be released, and he expressed his doubts that Tanah Merah was a suitable place for long-term settlement, due to the poor soil and prevalence of malaria.

He disagreed with the idea of gradually reducing the camp's population until it could be closed; fear of exile among Indonesian nationalists in Java and Sumatra was considered to be an added benefit.

[10][4] Eventually even high profile intellectuals such as Mohammad Hatta, who would become the first vice president of Indonesia, and Sutan Sjahrir, future first Indonesian Prime Minister were both exiled in 1935.

[10] Alidius Tjarda van Starkenborgh Stachouwer, who would be the last colonial Governor General of the Indies, took over for de Jonge in September 1936.

[39][40] A gold mining company set up in Tanah Merah in 1937, which led to the construction of an airfield and much higher traffic of foreign ships.

[44] Following the German invasion of the Netherlands, there was speculation that members of the Dutch fascist party Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging would be interned at Boven Digoel.

[45] But Indonesians continued to be exiled to Digoel until the final weeks of Dutch rule; the last one seems to have been a Chinese-Indonesian clerk from Sumatra who had been active in an anti-Japanaese and pro-communist group.

[4] In February 1943 there were rumours of a Japanese invasion at Merauke and U.S. General Douglas MacArthur identified the political prisoners as a possible fifth column.

[4] Charles van der Plas, a key member of the government in exile, made most of the decisions about the detainees' fate during the war.

[2][46] The Australian government had some objections to the transfer; detainees were initially imprisoned in Liverpool, New South Wales and in a newly built section of the Cowra POW camp, but were released after complaints from trade unions and the Communist Party of Australia.

These include Drama di Boven Digoel by Kwee Tek Hoay,[47] serialized in the magazine Panorama from 1929–32 and published in book form in 1938; Darah dan aer-mata di Boven Digoel by Oen Bo Tik (1931), Antara idoep dan mati atawa Boeron dari Boven-Digoel by Wiranta (1931); Merah by Lim Khing Ho (1937); Siasat yang Dahsyat by Shamsuddin Saleh (1936); Boven-Digoel: Het land van communisten en kannibalen by L. J.

This included not only Hatta and Sjahrir, as mentioned above, but many Communist Party members who sat in the House of Representatives during the Sukarno era.

It was published in Indonesian translation in 1977 as Limabelas tahun Digul: kamp konsentrasi di Nieuw Guinea, tempat persemaian kemerdekaan Indonesia.