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.

[5] 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.

[2] 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.

[2] 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 [fr], Jean Giraudoux, Erik Satie and Maurice Ravel.

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.

[8][9] 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.

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 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.

[4]: 11 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.

[17] 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.

[4]: 12 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.

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.

[25] 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.

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.

[14] When his erstwhile military escort from Operation Salamander, Tadeusz Chciuk, and his new wife Ewa were arrested as subversives by the Polish communist security service, Retinger allegedly appealed to Vyacheslav Molotov in Moscow to have them released.

[34][35] Dark days followed World War II when tensions rose between former Western and Eastern allies and in April 1946 Retinger's flat in Bayswater, West London, was broken into and his and his secretary's files ransacked by persons unknown.

[36] From the moment that Churchill made his "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri, in April 1946, Retinger turned his efforts to a modified European project he had harboured for decades.

[12]: 227–228 [39] Retinger, with his connections in Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland (he was a friend of Denis de Rougemont), took his cue from Winston Churchill's 1946 Zürich speech and found fertile ground with thirteen British Conservative members of Parliament who backed the idea of a loose European association of states.

He subsequently approached Duncan Sandys, Churchill's son-in-law and chairman of the United Europe Movement, about improving cooperation among the various organisations pursuing European unity.

The original group which met in the eponymous Dutch hotel in 1954 was gathered by Retinger and included David Rockefeller, Denis Healey with Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, as chairman.

During World War I and after, Retinger appears to have fallen under the spell of several women, especially the American journalist Jane Anderson, a supposed lover of Joseph Conrad.

[50] Over the decades since his 1960 death, the left-leaning Retinger continues to draw fascination and controversy with his political skill, his apparently selfless single-mindedness, and his lasting institutional legacy in Europe and beyond.

[51] Adam Pragier, a notable Polish exile and trenchant political commentator (and a secondary-school contemporary of Retinger's), has described him as "a sort of adventurer, but in the good sense of the word".

[46]: 60 In 2000 The Daily Telegraph's Ambrose Evans-Pritchard revealed, from declassified US Government records, that: The leaders of the European Movement – Retinger, the visionary Robert Schuman and the former Belgian prime minister Paul-Henri Spaak – were all treated as hired hands by their American sponsors.

[55] This revelation touching on Cold War circumstances was subsequently analysed in greater detail in 2003 by Le Figaro commentator Rémi Kauffer [fr].

[56] However, as professor Hugh Wilford shows, the initiative to win American backing for a "United States of Europe" came neither from Allen Dulles, deputy chief, then chief of the CIA, nor from Senator William Fulbright, chairman of the American Committee on United Europe, but from European lobbyists of disparate motivation, namely Coudenhove-Kalergi and Retinger, the latter eclipsing the former due to Retinger's close connection with Winston Churchill on European matters.

He was a figure whose allegiances, like his roots, remain obscure and whose accounts of himself varied according to his audience, thus undercutting his reliability – as reflected in various Joseph Conrad biographies and numerous other sources, including the considered, annotated review, by Norbert Wójtowicz of Poland's Institute of National Remembrance, of Marek Celt's 2006 posthumously published Z Retingerem do Warszawy i z powrotem.