Józef Hieronim Retinger (World War II noms de guerre Salamandra, "Salamander", and Brzoza, "Birch Tree"; 17 April 1888 – 12 June 1960) was a Polish politician, scholar, international political activist with access to some of the leading power brokers of the 20th century, a publicist and writer.
Already as a gifted student in Paris and London he mixed with the leading lights of music and literature. Most notably, he became a friend of compatriot Joseph Conrad. During World War I, the young Retinger became politically active in Austria-Hungary and Russia on behalf of the Polish independence movement. Following a failed attempt to broker peace between Austria-Hungary and the Allies of World War I, he had to retreat to Central America, where he became an economic adviser.
After the outbreak of World War II, he was principal adviser to the Polish government-in-exile. Early in 1944, a daring mission into Occupied Poland by parachute, with the help of British intelligence, added to his air of mystery and subsequent controversy.
A Freemason with a reputation as a grey eminence, after World War II he went on to co-found the European Movement, which led to the establishment of the European Union, and was instrumental in forming the secretive Bilderberg Group. In 1958, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Early life
Józef Retinger was born in Kraków, Poland (then part of Austria-Hungary), the youngest of five children: his father had a daughter, Aniela, from a first marriage to Helena Jawornicka. His mother was Maria Krystyna Czyrniańska, daughter of a Greek Catholic Lemko professor of chemistry at the Jagiellonian University. His father, Józef Stanisław Retinger, was the personal legal counsel and successful adviser to French-born Count Władysław Zamoyski. Retinger's great-grandfather, Filip Rettinger, was a Jewish tailor from Tarnów who, with his family, had converted to Catholicism in 1827.
When Count Zamoyski's lawyer grandson died, the Count took the promising youngster, Józef Retinger, into his household and paid for him to attend Kraków's Bartłomiej Nowodworski Lyceum.
Retinger's eldest brother, Emil, became a commander in the Polish Navy, and his son, , was during World War II (1943–45) stationed in the United Kingdom as a member, then leader, of Squadron 308 of the Polish Air Force. Retinger's brother Juliusz taught physiological chemistry at the University of Chicago and University of Wilno.
Retinger himself initially considered a career in the priesthood, but three months in the Jesuit novitiate in Rome confirmed that he was not suited to the priesthood.
Further financed by Count Zamoyski in 1906, Retinger entered simultaneously the Ecole des sciences politiques and the Sorbonne in Paris and two years later, aged twenty, became the youngest person ever to earn there a Ph.D. in literature.
While in the French capital, armed with introductions from Zamoyski and his own relative, the salonnière and pianist Misia Sert, he moved in intellectual circles and was befriended by among others, André Gide, François Mauriac, , Jean Giraudoux, Erik Satie and Maurice Ravel.
His early literary ambitions were stopped in their tracks when he presented his first novel, Les Souffleurs, to André Gide for his opinion. Gide told him: "Joseph, you will never be a writer."
He next went to Munich to study comparative psychology for a year. From there, encouraged by Zamoyski, in 1910 he moved to England, where he entered the London School of Economics for a year's study and began a lobbying operation on behalf of the Polish cause and its populations scattered across three ailing empires. Formally he became Director of the London Office of the Polish National Committee (1912–1914).
Thanks to an introduction by Arnold Bennett, whom he had met in Paris, Retinger developed a close friendship with his older Polish compatriot, the already well-established novelist, Joseph Conrad. Retinger urged Conrad to visit Poland, and on 28 July 1914, the day World War I broke out, Retinger, his wife Otolia, and Conrad and his wife and two sons arrived in Kraków, the two men's childhood stamping grounds (they were alumni of the same secondary school). Due to the closeness of the Russian border (Russia was then allied to Great Britain), the Conrads soon sought greater safety in the Tatra Mountains resort of Zakopane.Zdzisław Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, Rochester, New York, Camden House, 2007, , pp. 459–63.
Retinger would write about Conrad in his 1943 book, Conrad and His Contemporaries. Historian Norman Davies suggests that it was probably Conrad who introduced the "polyglot and polymath" Retinger to the British intelligence services.
Later Retinger became a personal friend of Major-General Sir Colin Gubbins, wartime head of SOE, and after the war an MI6 "asset".
World War I
With war clouds closing in, the project of writing a play together with Conrad based on the latter's novel, Nostromo, had to be abandoned as both men hurriedly left Austria-Hungary. Retinger would have been eligible for military call-up in Galicia (no mention of this is made by his biographers).
He put aside literary endeavours and once more assumed the role of a political lobbyist for Poland, publishing pamphlets and travelling between London, Paris, and New York, aided by Conrad in London. In the first years of the war, this was not on the agenda of the major powers.
Retinger looked instead for other potential alliances and political leverage, which led to meetings with leading Zionists of the time, including Chaim Weizmann, Vladimir Zhabotinski, and Nahum Sokolow, who were seeking international recognition and rights for the Jewish diaspora.
In 1916, guided by Zamoyski and with the approval of H. H. Asquith, David Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau with his old Parisian connections, Sixtus and Xavier de Bourbon Parme, the Duchess of Montebello and Marquis Boni de Castellane, as well as Zamoyski's friend the Polish General of the Jesuits, Włodzimierz Ledóchowski, Retinger became a "courier" in the secretive European dynastic negotiation suing for peace with Austria. It became known as the Sixtus Affair and was a failure, due to Germany's refusal to cooperate, thus making Austria more dependent on Germany.
In 1917 Retinger met Arthur "Boy" Capel, the half-French dilettante, polo player, and "sponsor" of Coco Chanel. Capel is said to have planted in Retinger's mind the idea of a world federal government based on an Anglo-French alliance.
After concerns for his personal safety due to his "political meddling" in Austria-Hungary and in the emergent Soviet Union, in 1918 Retinger was banned from France, and for several months sought sanctuary in Spain.
Mexican years
Retinger travelled on to Cuba and then to Mexico, where he became an unofficial political adviser to union organizer Luis Morones, whom he had fortuitously met crossing the Atlantic, and to President Plutarco Elías Calles.
A glimpse of Retinger, newly divorced and lovelorn for the American journalist Jane Anderson, appears in the biography of another American woman, the communist sympathiser Katherine Anne Porter, a member of the Morones circle. In it he is described as a "Polish intriguer" and "British Marxist". In 1921, while on an obscure mission to the United States to buy saddles, Retinger was arrested and imprisoned in Laredo, and Porter was dispatched from Mexico to get him released. That same year Retinger had proposed that Katherine Porter and her friend Mary Doherty accompany him to Europe to do "collaborative work", an offer that was spurned.
Retinger helped advance Mexico's nationalization of its oil industry in 1928. Ethridge's full review is on pp. 94–95 His activities in Mexico lasted almost seven years and only ended with Calles' fall from power in 1936. They inspired Retinger to write three volumes on the tumultuous events in that Latin American republic. The Mexican years were punctuated by trips back to Europe, where he took on the role of representative in the United Kingdom of the Polish Socialist Party (1924–1928).
In 1926 he married his second wife, Stella, with whom he travelled to Mexico on one occasion. After her death in 1933 his two daughters were left in the care of their maternal grandmother and were estranged from him until the 1950s.
In the rest of the interwar period, he published many contributions in periodicals such as the Polish Wiadomości Literackie (Literary News), on literary and political subjects.
Building blocks on the table
During World War II, Retinger, who was in London, was involved in arranging for Polish troops to be evacuated to Britain from France. He was asked by Winston Churchill personally to escort Władysław Sikorski by plane to England from France, which had just capitulated to the invading Germans.
Retinger became principal adviser and confidant to the Prime Minister of the Polish Government-in-Exile now established in London. Their political relationship actually went back to 1916 and had been strengthened during Sikorski's earlier brief stint as prime minister, 1922–23, in newly independent Poland.
Sikorski's dependence on Retinger was the greater as Sikorski had no mastery of the English language. Retinger was dispatched to talk with other exiled government representatives in London, who included Marcel-Henri Jaspar, Paul Van Zeeland, and Paul-Henri Spaak, in preparation for a postwar geopolitical landscape. He went on to posit a "Sikorski Plan" consisting of two stages, the first of which was signed in January 1942 and proposed a Polish-Czech confederation. The idea was to expand it into a Central European confederation with Poland and Lithuania, Czechoslovakia as its nucleus around which would be grouped Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Greece. The agenda behind this was to create a common political blueprint for smaller countries abutting larger European powers and became the basis of a Belgian-Dutch union which would mirror the Polish-Czech arrangement.
This scheme of Retinger's caused problems between London and Moscow. In order not to tread on Soviet toes, the British altered their position and refused to back Sikorski's negotiations with the eight smaller European states. In his speech on the Council of Europe, Winston Churchill BBC radio broadcast on 21 March 1943 referred to the necessity of smaller nations forming groupings, but that it was too early to go into detail. The most Retinger was able to achieve was to push through the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement, signed on 30 July 1941, which provided for the formation of the Anders' army, thus ridding Stalin of the immediate human problem posed by the hundreds of thousands of Polish POWs and deportees from the Soviet occupied Kresy regions of the former Second Polish Republic, who after an arduous odyssey across thousands of miles would eventually end up as the United Kingdom's human problem. This trade-off foreshadowed the Tehran and Yalta Conferences.
Brushes with death Retinger just avoided perishing at Gibraltar with Władysław Sikorski, in July 1943, when he was not needed in the Premier's Near East troop inspection and was thought better employed in London. The spare seat on the plane went to Sikorski's daughter, who died with her father.
Retinger was devastated by this turn of events. His relations with Sikorski's successor, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, were much more ambivalent, but he obtained the latter's consent to go on a special SOE mission to Poland in April 1944.Bułhak, Władysław. "The Foreign Office and the Special Operations Executive and the Expedition of Józef Hieronim Retinger to Poland, April–July 1944", The Polish Review, vol. 61, no. 3, 2016, pp. 33–57.