Mile Budak (30 August 1889 – 7 June 1945) was a Croatian politician and writer best known as one of the chief ideologists of the Croatian fascist Ustaša movement, which ruled the Independent State of Croatia during World War II in Yugoslavia from 1941 to 1945 and waged a genocidal campaign of extermination against its Roma and Jewish population, and of extermination, expulsion and religious conversion against its Serb population.

[2] In 1912, he was arrested by Austro-Hungarian authorities over his alleged role in the attempted assassination of Slavko Cuvaj, the ban of Croatia.

Budak and Vladko Maček served as lawyers representing Marko Hranilović and Matija Soldin at trial amid the January 6th Dictatorship.

His works included the 1938 Ognjište (The Hearth),[3] the 1933 Opanci dida Vidurine (Grandpa Vidurina's Shoes),[4] and the 1939 Rascvjetana trešnja (The Blossoming Cherry Tree).

Noth wrote: "Here we find the stubborn, spiritual-realistic conception of man and his relation to the soil on which he lives and which Mile Budak symbolizes as 'the hearth'".

The newspaper was vocal in its criticism of the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS) and opposed the Cvetković–Maček Agreement, by which the autonomous Banovina of Croatia was created.

[10] As such, he publicly stated that forcible expulsion and religious conversion of the ethnic Serb minority was the official national policy.

Thus, he remarked on 6 June 1941 in Križevci: The Serbs came to our territories, because they were persecuted by the Turkish gangs, they came as plunderers and the filth from the Balkans.

[14][15] Following the Independent State of Croatia evacuation to Austria, Budak was captured by British military authorities and handed over to Tito's Partisans on 18 May 1945.

He was court-martialled (before the military court of the 2nd Yugoslav army) in Zagreb on 6 June 1945 and was sentenced to death by hanging the same day.