page_title: Józef Retinger
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Józef Retinger / Early life
caption_attribution_description: Polski: Władysław Zamoyski (1853-1924)
context_page_description: Józef Hieronim Retinger was a Polish 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 cofound 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.
context_section_description: 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 converted to Catholicism in 1827. When his lawyer grandson died, Count Zamoyski took the promising youngster, Józef, into his household and paid for him to attend the Bartłomiej Nowodworski High School in Kraków. Retinger's eldest brother, Emil, became a commander in the Polish Navy, while his son, Witold Retinger, was stationed in the United Kingdom during World War II (1943–45), 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 he would not be suited to the life.
  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 a Ph.D. in literature from there. 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, Bernard Grasset, 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). During this time he continued to move in élite circles and  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, his wife, and their 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. 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".
caption: Władysław Zamoyski (1853-1924)
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