Who was Józef Hieronim Retinger?
Consider these points:
He was undoubtedly a person of tremendous charisma, a magnetic personality whose life story is filled with adventure and accomplishment. My Dad spent several months in daily close contact with Mr. Retinger in 1944 and they were friends after that.
In English, his name would be Joseph Hieronimus Retinger. For the purpose of this brief biographical essay, we'll use his initials, JHR.
He was born in Kraków on April 17th, 1888, the youngest of four children. This was at a time when there was no Poland on the map, and that part of Europe was a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire known as Galicia. Like many Poles of all generations, he wished fervently to see Poland become an independent country again. He once told a friend, "I wish Poland would soon be free again so I would not have to be a damn patriot!" JHR's father was Józef Stanislaw Retinger, the private legal counsel and advisor to the eminent Polish nobleman Count Wladyslaw Zamoyski. The elder Retinger died suddenly while JHR was still a lad, and Count Zamoyski took him under his wing. JHR thought about becoming a priest and enrolled in a seminary, but withdrew after concluding that the requirement of celibacy was going to be a problematic hurdle. Count Zamoyski sent him to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, covering all of his expenses. Aged 18, JHR arrived in Paris in 1906. Being the protégé of the fabulously wealthy and impeccably connected Count Zamoyski, JHR was granted entrée into Parisian society and was able to befriend an impressive array of people while still a student at the Ecole des Sciences Politiques. In other words, in modern English he would have been a Political Science major. His friends included the Marquis de Castellane, whom everyone called Boni, and a couple of starving artists named Maurice Ravel and Pierre Bonnard. He also knew personally numerous other painters and musicians, including the dazzling pianist Ricardo Vinez, the composers Claude Terrasse, Eric Satie, Francois Poulenc, and the writers Francois Mauriac and André Gide. A veritable Who's Who in 20th Century France!
Two cute anecdotes may be mentioned here. Once, JHR showed Gide a manuscript of a book he was working on, and Gide very kindly read through the whole thing and made copious notes in the margins, tried to explain to him the art of writing, etc., but in the end he said, "Anyway, my dear Joseph, I don't think you will ever be a writer," and that was that as far as JHR's literary ambitions were concerned. Not that this frank critique of his writing skills got in the way of their friendship! On another occasion, he and some friends were over at Ravel's, and Ravel played them a new composition on the piano and asked Retinger what he thought of it. "I wouldn't miss the next streetcar to hear the end of it," JHR replied with a smile. Devastatingly honest!
Hanging out in cafés and salons with artists of all kinds, bohemian or otherwise, did not take anything away from JHR's work ethic. In 1908 he received his PhD (Docteur es Lettres) in Political Science from the Sorbonne at the age of twenty, establishing a record as the youngest PhD ever at the Sorbonne. After that, he continued his studies at the University of Munich, reading Comparative Psychology (Völkerpsychologie) with the idea that it would be useful in his future political career. In Munich, again, he met and befriended a lot of bright people, including Hans von Weber, and tried to learn a thing or two about publishing.
JHR returned to Kraków in 1912 and started a literary monthly. Many writers gave him manuscripts for publication -- well-established Polish writers as well as undiscovered talents who were to make their mark later, but also friends from his University days, including Arnold Bennett, Franz Bley and Gide, who let him serialize his book La Porte Etroite before it was published in France. He also married a beautiful Polish girl named Otylia Zubrzycka. (Some sources have her as "Otalia" or "Otolia." I'm going with "Otylia.")
It was around this time, before the Great War, that JHR first embarked on his career of political activity. An organization representing a cross-section of the various Polish political groupings in Galicia, called the Supreme National Council, asked JHR to open a bureau in London in order to advocate for Polish matters in Great Britain. He was basically doing public relations for the Polish cause, which was more or less a non-subject in Britain in those days, so he set out to make contacts among those people who might one day be influential. One of his most important friends turned out to be Joseph Conrad, the Polish writer who had moved to England years before and became internationally renowned for The Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim . They met through a mutual friend, Arnold Bennett, whom JHR had known in his Sorbonne days and who had written for JHR's literary monthly. JHR and Conrad became the best of friends and spent a lot of time together. JHR later wrote an excellent souvenir of their time together, entitled Conrad and His Contemporaries (London: Minerva, 1941). The Retingers and the Conrads were actually vacationing in Galicia, i.e., Poland, in the summer of 1914 when war broke out.
During the Great War, JHR tried to use his contacts to persuade Austria to withdraw from its alliance with Germany and make a separate peace. This didn't work out, and by his meddling he managed to seriously offend some important people. He was declared persona non grata by Austria, was suddenly unwelcome in Britain, the Germans wanted him dead, and he had to leave France for Spain -- penniless! He wound up in Mexico, where he spent most of the 1920s and got to know all the key players, trade unionists, politicians, and so on. His good friend Calles eventually became the President of Mexico.
During the Second World War, in which Poland was once again wiped off the map by Germany and the Soviet Union, JHR was the principal political advisor to Polish Prime Minister General Wladyslaw Sikorski, as well as being a close friend of his. He accompanied the general to Tobruk when that city was under siege -- the only civilian in the group. JHR was devastated when Sikorski was killed in a suspicious plane crash upon takeoff from Gibraltar in 1943, but continued to play an important advisory role in the Polish Government in Exile. He undertook a mission to parachute into occupied Poland in 1944, when he was 56 years old, thereby setting a record as the oldest man to go on a combat parachute mission. That mission was code named Operation Salamander. Retinger himself was also code named Salamander, but carried ID naming him as Captain Paisley, in a British uniform. Click here to see an authentic "Most Secret" document outlining the planning for Operation Salamander. (Note: The document is no longer classified, it's on public display at a museum in Poland, and it's been published in books -- so I'm not divulging any sensitive material here.)
My Dad, code named Sulima, was in charge of JHR's safety during that mission, and got to know him well. The AK (Home Army) was suspicious of Retinger and ordered him liquidated during that summer of 1944. Now, sixty years later, it's becoming increasingly clear that the AK top brass were dead set against this mission of Retinger's and actively and repeatedly sabotaged it. They arranged for the mission to be delayed by months; two key containers of equipment disappeared; the plane took off streaming fuel; Retinger was robbed of his papers and prevented from boarding a crucial plane; attempts were made on his life. A nurse/assassin named Izabela Horodecka was to give him a lethal substance (she says she doesn't know what was in it) but gave him only half the dose, because an officer named Rutkowski took the other half away from her. This was the same Rutkowski who arranged to strip JHR of all his papers, strong-arm him off into a bush, and keep him off that plane, all on the orders of the AK. So it can fairly be said that Mikolajczyk's government was working with an army that opposed it in every way. No wonder Mikolajczyk resigned! JHR survived the poisoning, but was delayed by two crucial months in returning to London, and he was paralyzed for several months afterward. My Dad had to carry him on board a plane in his arms, like a child. Later, back in London, Retinger convalesced at the Dorchester Hotel, where my Dad visited him. He told me that Rutkowski had visited JHR at the Dorchester as well, kind of trying to apologise, like "no hard feelings, OK?, I was just following orders," etc., whereupon JHR gave him a royal chewing out.
After the Second World War was finally over and Poland had been thoroughly destroyed by the Germans only to be handed right over to the Soviets, Joseph Retinger managed to persuade the British Army to give a large amount of valuable surplus military materiel to Poland, where equipment of all kinds was so sorely needed. Pops was his secretary there for a time, and took this picture of a frail-looking Mr. Retinger standing amid the ruins of what was once the beautiful city of Warsaw.
It soon became evident that the Communists were grabbing power in Poland and cracking down hard. Retinger very wisely got the hell out of there while he could, and returned to London. My Dad stayed behind with his pregnant young wife, and they both got arrested, interrogated and imprisoned at the dreaded UB prison on Koszykowa Street in Warsaw.
In the years after the war, Retinger made it his personal mission in life to bring about a united, peaceful Europe. He initiated the European League for Economic Cooperation, which was a precursor to what eventually became the European Economic Community and finally today's European Union. He was highly motivated to try to put an end to the seemingly incessant wars that had been tearing Europe to shreds. He lived to see his dream of a united Europe begin to take shape.
His final achievement was also his most controversial -- and he'd had his hand in plenty of controversies before. Retinger convened a unique conference at the Bilderberg Hotel in the Netherlands, bringing together into one room all the most important key players in the entire international scene for a conference removed from the glare of publicity and dedicated to truly unfettered dialogue between all the conferees. The idea was that if we can just all work together to address our problems, then maybe we can hold back the next World War, which as we all know would be a nuclear holocaust. The event was such a success that it has become a regular event known as the Bilderberg Conference, convening every year or two. The list of attendees is invariably a "Who's Who" of world players. Many people regard the whole Bilderberg Conference thing with a great deal of suspicion, and some people view it as beyond evil, making Mr. Retinger the architect of a very nasty plan for the Illuminati (or someone) to take over the world. I'm staying out of that one. My Dad knew him well and thought very highly of him, and most certainly didn't ascribe any evil intentions to a plan to unite Europe and stop the warring and fighting.
Sources:
Memoirs of an Eminence Grise by Joseph Retinger, edited and supplemented by Jan Pomian, Sussex University Press, 1972. ISBN 0 85621 002 1
Kuzynek Diabla by Olgierd Terlecki, Kraków, KAW, 1988. ISBN 83 03 02102 8
Retinger: Mason i Agent Syjonizmu by Henryk Pajak, Lublin, Retro, 1996. ISBN 83 905292 2 X
Z Retingerem do Warszawy i z powrotem: Raport z Podziemia 1944 by Marek Celt, Lomianki, LTW 2006. ISBN 83 88736 88 4
Special thanks go to Karolina Sikora at the Muzeum Historii Polskiego Ruchu Ludowego in Warsaw.
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Updated February 19th, 2008 by Jan Chciuk-Celt
