The camp was built on the site of a Roman Catholic Monastery twenty kilometres from Paramaribo which was expanded to house a larger number of detainees.

[3] One of the sites selected was Copieweg, a Roman Catholic Monastery twenty kilometres from Paramaribo which contained a farm and a missionary school for Javanese students.

[3] Twelve more barracks were built behind the Monastery later in 1940 to house future detainees; barbed wire and other building materials were shipped from the United States.

[3] A visit to the camp by a representative of the Red Cross in 1942 found the conditions to be relatively good but recommended improvements to the housing barracks and distributed clothing which had been brought from Germany.

[14][15] In March 1942 another group of German detainees escaped, including once again some sailors from the Goslar as well as the former plantation owner of Beekhuizen, and tried to flee to French Guiana.

Wim Bos Verschuur, a Surinam politician and writer, was arrested without charge for his public criticism of Governor General Johannes Kielstra, and was detained in the camp in August 1943.

[20] Some communists and other figures critical of the Surinam administration were also interned during the war, leading to comments in the press that the powers of the Governor General to detain his opponents for any reason were too broad.

[2] These sailed to Amsterdam aboard the Bloemfontijn, which also picked up other former German detainees in the Antilles; most of these deportees eventually ended up in East Germany in the area under Soviet occupation.