Nikola Rušinović

Nikola Rušinović (13 November 1908 – 28 August 1993) was a Croatian-American physician and diplomat who served as the first unofficial representative of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) to the Holy See from 1941 to 1942, during World War II.

Born in Philadelphia, he resettled in his mother's native Dalmatia as a child and obtained his MD at the Zagreb Faculty of Medicine. Following the creation of the NDH in April 1941, he joined the puppet state's civil service. In Rome, his primary objective was to convince the Vatican to recognize the NDH. Amidst concern from certain high-ranking Vatican officials about reports of atrocities, he attempted to justify the NDH's policy of forced conversions of Serbs to Catholicism, but was hindered by his diplomatic inexperience and was ultimately unable to convince the Holy See to issue a formal recognition. Until February 1943, he served as a liaison to the Italian Second Army headquarters and helped coordinate anti-Partisan operations in occupied Yugoslavia. He later served as the NDH's consul general in Munich and its ambassador to Bulgaria.

After the war, Rušinović was recruited by American military intelligence and the Yugoslav authorities' request for his extradition was ignored by the U.S Military Government in Europe. In the immediate post-war years, he practised internal medicine in Argentina. He settled in the United States in 1947, and later underwent special training in psychiatry, becoming a professor at the University of Louisville School of Medicine in Kentucky and the chief of the psychiatric department at a Veterans Affairs hospital in Louisville under the name Nicholas Russinovich. Following his retirement, he was appointed professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Louisville and was made a life member of the American Psychiatric Association. He died in Philadelphia in 1993 and his memoirs were published posthumously.