Before the Second World War, Polish Radio operated one national channel – broadcast from 1931 from one of Europe's most powerful longwave transmitters, situated at Raszyn just outside Warsaw and destroyed in 1939 due to invasion of German Army – and nine regional stations: A tenth regional station was planned for Łuck, but the outbreak of war meant that it never opened.

The invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union led to the destruction of the network in September 1939, with its final broadcast being a performance of Nocturne in C-sharp minor, Op.

This body was dissolved in 1992, Polskie Radio S.A. and Telewizja Polska S.A. becoming politically dependent corporations, each of which was admitted to full active membership of the European Broadcasting Union on 1 January 1993 with the merger of EBU and OIRT.

[14][15] Czesław Miłosz, recipient of the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature, worked as a literary programmer at Polish Radio Wilno in 1936.

[16] On 29 October 2024, OFF Radio Krakow released a programme that presented itself as an interview with laureate Wisława Szymborska who had died in 2012 thus her voice being artificially generated; this was not long after its entire editorial team was dismissed.