Wojciechowski was born in Stryj near
Lviv (
Stryi,
Ukraine), then
Austro-Hungarian Galicia. In
World War I he volunteered
Piłsudski's Legion but was not deployed anymore. In 1921, Wojciechowski began studying at the
Jan Kazimierz University in
Lwów, which had then just been re-incorporated in the re-created Polish state (now
Lviv in
Ukraine). In 1924, he obtained a doctorate in medieval history, social sciences, and economics, and became assistant professor at the Institute for
Auxiliary Sciences of History. In 1924 he published his first concept of the "motherland territories" of Poland. His definition of "Polish motherland" was the areas as acquired by 10th-century
Piast Poland in the era of
Mieszko I and
Boleslaw Krzywousty (
Greater Poland,
Silesia,
Pomerania,
Neumark,
West Prussia). During his political career he opposed Dmowski and the movement he belonged to sought integration with
Józef Piłsudski's
sanacja faction, hoping that both main political factions in Poland would unite led by interest in well being of Polish nation However, he considered Dmowski one of the most influential persons of his life. Wojciechowski initially saw "traces of a modern national thought" in the
National Socialism. He initially admired
Hitler's anti-Jewish policy as a good example for Poland. He accepted the
Anschluss of Austria and the
Munich Agreement but became more critical of Hitler's politics in the course of time. According to Tomasz Kenar he was alarmed by Hitler's expansionism but accepted the "Anschluss" of Austria, hoping that it would put Italy against Nazi Germany and into the sphere of Polish alliance. Regarding Munich Agreement he saw Czechoslovakia as too closely allied Soviet Union; while Czechs were in his view natural allies of Poles, their close contacts with the Soviets made such alliance impossible. He remained opposed to German annexation of Czechoslovakia, worried that such event would make Polish military situation difficult. Wojciechowski envisioned a Polish-led block in Central Europe composed of Hungary, Romania, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and in close relationship with Italy, that would oppose both German expansionism and Soviet pressure on these states; he wrote that such alliance would "rescue Christianity" from the threat of "Bolshevik communism" and "hitlerite paganism". Later on he focused his attention towards
Fascist Italy, due to his interest in a "strong state", "depending on legal norms, in tradition of Roman law". During Nazi German occupation of Poland he along with his family sheltered a Jewish woman and in a 1945 publication he condemned the mass murder of Jews by
Nazi Germany during the war as "monstrous" Wojciechowski is described as a co-initiator of the Polish "Western thought" (
myśl zachodnia), Unlike Ostforschung this movement was marginal in Poland, and limited only to Poznań University, while the Ostforschung was influential and remained (unlike the Poznań thinkers who were in conflict with state authorities both before and after World War II) in friendly relations with Berlin government. The Polish researchers rejected the state model found in Germany, and preferred
Francoist Spain or Salazar's
Portugal, remaining distrustful of Hitler. They rejected such ideas as biological racism, eugenics and militarism and neo-pagan movement.
German occupation of Poland Fate during German occupation While initially able to escape Germans, he was captured by them in October 1939 and held as
hostage along with other Polish intellectuals, craftsmen, politicians and students. The group was held as part of German effort to crush Polish resistance, and they were threatened with murder in case of armed resistance. Every few days, Wojciechowski was allowed to visit home. If he wouldn't return, the others would be shot. Eventually he was released two months later, due to his pregnant wife's plea. Despite his release, the family faced further reprisals, as it had to flee
Poznań as initial
ethnic cleansing of Poles from the region was initiated by Nazi German authorities. Wojciechowski eventually found refugee at a friend's house in Kraków.
Underground activity During the occupation of Poland in
World War II, he was involved with the
Polish underground authorities, teaching at the
Uniwersytet Ziem Zachodnich ("University of the Western Territories", a part of the necessary
underground education system) necessary, as all Poles were forbidden basic schooling as part of German
genocide regarding Polish nation. He continued his research, and supervised his students (
Zdzisław Kaczmarczyk,
Kazimierz Kolańczyk) who finished two
dissertations. As part of conspiracy during Nazi German occupation he was one of the founding members of
Ojczyzna-Omega, a conspiracy movement that gathered surviving (as Germans carried out systematic extermination of Polish educated classes) Polish intellectuals, priests, journalists, lawyers and teachers, who organised charity work, secret education and worked on concepts of post-war Poland; most of the members were
Christian democrats and
National Democrats. Ojczyzna-Omega envisioned a post-war Poland that would be a democratic, efficiently administrated state populated mainly by Polish majority alongside Jewish population and Slavic groups. The organisation believed that Nazi Germany (which attempted a genocide of Poles) was far more dangerous than Soviet Union and pushed for a compromise with Soviets. Commissioned by the
Union of Armed Struggle, a forerunner of the
Home Army, Wojciechowski created a concept of a post-war Polish–German border in 1941, which included an overview of the Polish and Polonizable part of the population in areas between the pre-war border and the
Oder-Neisse line. In tune with and probably in charge of Wojciechowski the director of the library of
Kórnik at that time prepared the takeover of archives, museums and libraries in the future Western territories. In his designs Wojciechowski wanted to avoid what he defined as the mistakes of the Versailles Treaty. The border at Oder and Lusatian Neisse was essential for him, as he considered it, the historical argument was not decisive here, the safest and most defensible one. On 17 December 1944
Tomasz Arciszewski, the Polish Prime Minister of the
Polish government-in-exile in London, declared in a
Sunday Times interview, that a post-war Poland had no territorial claims towards
Stettin (Szczecin) and
Breslau (Wrocław) but considers
Lviv and
Wilna an integral part of the Polish state. This led to a vote of no confidence of the Ojczyzna-group against Arciszewski for this "renunciation of the Polish war aims" and finally to the breakup with the Polish government-in-exile in London. Also in December 1944 he resumed the consequences of the failed
Warsaw Uprising that, from his view, had shown, that not the
Home Army but only the
Red Army was capable to liberate Warsaw. On 13 February 1945 Wojciechowski met the Prime Minister of the
Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland,
Edward Osóbka-Morawski, and handed over a memorandum about the foundation and activities of the Western Institute in which he asked for the support of the institute. The memorandum was addressed to the “Polish government”, thus recognizing the Provisional Government, contrary to the London exile-government, as legitimate. Conversely Wojciechowski's concept aided the governmental demand to legitimize the Polish acquirements in the West
Post-war In 1945 his book
"Poland-Germany. Ten centuries of struggle" (first edition 1933) was reissued. To Wojciechowski the history of Polish-German relations was coined by an eternal struggle against German aggression which was founded on a lack of the ability of Germans to cohabit peacefully with Slavs and their "biological" hatred of everything Slavic. Wojciechowski described his view of the post-war situation: He resumed teaching at UAM. He became a member of the
Polish Academy of Learning (PAU) in 1945 and of the
Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) in 1952. In 1944, he established the
Western Institute (Instytut Zachodni), an institution dedicated to studying the Polish history of what would become the
Recovered Territories. Initially in
Warsaw, the institute's seat moved to Poznań in 1945. Wojciechowski remained its director until his death in 1955. In 1945, Wojciechowski founded the affiliated journal
Przegląd Zachodni ("Western Review") and remained his editor-in-chief until his death in 1955. (An English-language version of the journal under the title
Polish Western Affairs was published from 1960 to 1994). From 1948–52, he was also founder and editor-in-chief of the "Journal of Law and History" (
Czasopismo Prawno-Historyczne), which continues to exist to this day. In his prologue to the bookseries "Old Polish lands" (1948–1957) he explained the purpose of the volumes to the reader: "Our publication ... is biased; in fact, it is consciously biased. ... We have not gone out of our way to write so-called objective history. Our task was to present the Polish history of those territories and to place the modern Polish reality of those territories within this historical context." In 1950, as Poland underwent
Stalinization, Wojciechowski was condemned for his "anti-German chauvinism" at a Polish historians conference. Hence the open synthesis of nationalist and communist historiography became less influential, though Polish Marxist publications maintained an anti-German undertone. Zygmunt Wojciechowski died in
Poznań,
Poland, he was the father of historian
Marian Wojciechowski (1927–2006).
Recognition He was a recipient of Commander's Cross and Officer's Cross of
Order of Polonia Restituta. In 1984 the Western Institute was eventually named in his honor. In Poland Zygmunt Wojciechowski is recognised today as exceptional historian, and one of people who formed Polish intellectual elites. == Publications ==