Nikola Mandić

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Nikola Mandić (Travnik, January 20, 1869 – Zagreb, June 7, 1945), was a Croatian politician.

Mandić was born in what was then Ottoman Bosnia and Herzegovina in Travnik in 1869 (the county soon came into the hands of the Austrian Empire). Mandić finished gymnasium in Sarajevo. He later doctored in law at Vienna in 1894. In 1907 he helped found, and became president of, the Croatian National Union (Hrvatska narodna zajednica), a political party representing Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina's Regional Parliament. He was elected to the parliament in 1910 and became its president in 1912. From 1914 Mandić took on the role of assistant to the nation's regional governor, originally Oskar Potiorek, later a fellow Croat, Stefan Sarkotić.

After 1918 Bosnia and Herzegovina became a part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Mandić was elected into its Constitutional Assembly in 1920 under the Croatian Popular Party (Hrvatska pučka stranka).

His final political acts came in the late stages of his life. The Independent State of Croatia was proclaimed in 1941 and included all of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He had little involvement with the regime until September 2, 1943 when he was named president of the government of the Independent State of Croatia. He held this position until the state's collapse in 1945. In the late stages of World War II as Croatian forces retreated towards Austria, Mandić, along with other members of the government, were taken captive by the British. The British handed Mandić over to Communist Yugoslavia's government which executed the then 76-year-old Mandić after a one-day trial.