Đakovo-Osijek, and prior to and during World War II, was the home to one of Croatia's largest concentrations of ethnic Germans. In November 1941, two senior local Jewish community leaders, Dragutin Rosenberg and Aleksandar Klein, persuaded the head of the Jewish Bureau of the Ustaše Surveillance Service (; UNS), Vilko Kühnel, to authorize the establishment of a refugee camp in Đakovo. In late November, the Osijek police ordered the town's Jewish community to make room within five days for 2,000 Jewish women and children. Whereas women and children would be deported to Đakovo, Jewish males were to be deported to the largest of the NDH's concentration camps, Jasenovac. Local Jewish youths quickly converted a -long, three-storey abandoned flour mill that had once been used by the archdiocese into a refugee camp to house the women and children. Several surrounding buildings were subsequently added to the camp. On 2 December, 1,800 Jewish women and children and fifty Bosnian Serb women arrived at the camp. Most were from Sarajevo, but also from Zagreb, Požega, Pakrac, Slavonski and Bosanski Brod, Nova Gradiška, Zenica and Travnik. On 8 December, the Jewish community in Sarajevo requested that the Jewish communities in Sarajevo, Zagreb and Osijek be permitted to provide donations to support the civilian populations of the Jasenovac, Loborgrad and Đakovo camps. Ten days later, the UNS's Jewish Bureau permitted the funds that had been raised by the Jewish communities to be allocated to the detainees at these camps. During their confinement, the detainees were made to do manual labour. Ceramics and leather workshops were established within the camp, where most of the adult female detainees worked. As many as 400 women were made to do agricultural work on farms and in fields near the camp. A kindergarten was organized for the children. The campgrounds provided inadequate shelter from the elements. The detainees were subjected to appalling sanitary conditions. During the first several months of its existence, the camp was guarded by two or three police officers under the command of Dragutin Mayer. The policemen allowed detainees to leave the camp to purchase necessary goods in the town, to visit the hospital in Osijek and to call relatives and friends. Although the detainees were permitted to purchase medicine and the pesticide Zyklon B for disinfection, they were price gouged by the Ustaše. Typhoid epidemic In early 1942, the camp experienced a typhoid outbreak. Prominent locals,