The cement plant in Podsused was put into operation in 1908 under the name Croatia, as a branch of the European chain of factories of the Jewish Mandl family. Croatia was first confiscated by the Ustasha regime and then, after the communist nationalization in the 1940s, renamed Sloboda. It operated under that name until it closed in the 1980s. Felix Mandl, the grandson of the founder of the chain of factories, escaped from Nazi Germany in the late 1930s and came to Zagreb. He managed the plant in the Second World War.