All the interests of the regimes created with their help were subordinated to the goals of the Third Reich, who planned to exploit the human and material potentials of the occupied countries.
With the agreement with the Third Reich, the Independent State of Croatia undertook to send about 200,000 workers to work in Germany and the occupied countries. Despite propaganda and promises of "good wages and a good life", the response from volunteer workers was insufficient.
German authorities asked the Ustashas for a number of detainees for forced labor. Initially, the detainees, men, were deported from the camps in Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška to forced labor through the German camp Sajmište in Zemun (Anhalterlager Semlin-Reception Camp Zemun). From April 26, 1942, when the first transport arrived from the Jasenovac camp, until June 12 of the same year, about 2,500 people were sent from the Jasenovac concentration camp to forced labor camps in Germany.
From the summer to the winter of 1942, a commission of the German organization Todt operated in the Stara Gradiška camp, selecting and sending detainees to forced labor. Serbian, Croatian and Muslim men and women able enough to work were selected. By taking over the German camps in Sisak and Vinkovci in early 1943, the Ustashas also took over the deportation of detainees to forced labor camps in the Third Reich.
Several thousand detainees were deported from Ustasha concentration camps to forced labor camps in the Third Reich and Norway. Many died of starvation, exhaustion and disease or were killed in Allied bombing raids during their stay in Germany. The last major transport of about 600 detainees was deported from the Jasenovac concentration camp on February 18, 1945, and they were detained for work in and around Linz.