Józef Piłsudski: The Man Who Tried to Stop Hitler — But Was Ignored
He foresaw Hitler’s rise, proposed a plan to stop him and defended Poland’s Jews — yet history nearly forgot him. Who was Józef Piłsudski?
In 1933, just a month after Adolf Hitler rose to power, Józef Piłsudski, the founding father of modern Poland, sent a secret envoy to Paris with a bold proposal: a “preventative war” to depose Hitler before he could plunge Europe into another catastrophic conflict. Piłsudski, deeply alarmed by the Nazis’ rise, believed that decisive action was the only way to preserve peace. Yet the French not only rejected his plan — they condemned him as a “warmonger.” Forced to abandon his initiative, Piłsudski signed a nonaggression pact with Germany in 1934.
Unlike other European leaders, Piłsudski had both the foresight and moral clarity to recognize the danger ahead. He was no alarmist; he was a voracious reader who had studied Mein Kampf in detail, taking notes on each chapter and drawing chilling conclusions about Hitler’s intentions. Had the French understood the basis of his warnings, perhaps they would have taken him more seriously.
I had the privilege of sitting down with Professor Joshua Zimmerman to discuss his recent biography on Piłsudski and the extraordinary legacy of this often-overlooked statesman.
Zimmerman first became fascinated with Piłsudski in graduate school, when he discovered a striking absence of substantial English-language literature about the Polish leader. But what intrigued him even more was Piłsudski’s surprising devotion to the Jewish community. “He had written around 180 articles between 1895 and 1902 in the Polish socialist press,” Zimmerman said, “and one in every three was devoted to the Jews.”
Born into a landed noble family, Piłsudski was raised with a deep ethic of respect for others, regardless of background or religion. As a teenager, he attended a Russian state gymnasium in Vilna, where he joined an underground reading group that studied banned literature — works on Polish uprisings, American democracy and constitutional rights. The group included Jewish members, and some of the historical narratives they read described Jewish fighters who had died for Polish independence. These early experiences shaped his belief in a multiethnic Polish state.
Piłsudski’s military and political career began in earnest during World War I. Refusing to pledge allegiance to the German and Austro-Hungarian empires, he was imprisoned for 16 months until the war’s end. His principled stance turned him into a national hero. Upon Poland’s rebirth in 1918, Piłsudski was named head of state and commander in chief. But rather than consolidate power, he moved quickly to establish democratic institutions. Within weeks, he formed a provisional government and scheduled elections. On Jan. 26, 1919, Poland held its first free and fair elections in over a century.
Following the elections, Piłsudski stepped down, stating that he had not been elected and could not legitimately hold office. The newly elected parliament unanimously reinstated him as head of state. “Only now do I regard myself as the legitimate head of state,” he declared.
Yet, in 1926, after the assassination of his close friend and political ally President Gabriel Narutowicz, Piłsudski reversed course and seized power in a coup. While some historians have labeled his seizure of power as an “autocratic turn,” Zimmerman challenges this framing in his biography. In his view, Piłsudski’s actions were not rooted in a lust for power, but stemmed from his desire to safeguard Poland’s fragile pluralism. He asserts that Piłsudski became disillusioned when the far-right — and even the assassin himself — claimed that Narutowicz had been “put into office by the Jews.” For Piłsudski, the violent, antisemitic backlash against a democratically elected president signaled that Poland was not yet ready to uphold the pluralistic values he had long championed.
Perhaps Piłsudski’s most prescient moment came in 1933, when he proposed his preventative war plan. At the time, Germany’s army was a fraction of Poland’s, and France’s military might dwarfed both. Had the plan been accepted, Zimmerman argues, Berlin would have fallen in ten days. Instead, Piłsudski, abandoned by potential allies, was forced to pursue a nonaggression pact with Germany in 1934. He died the following year, in 1935.
One powerful moment Zimmerman recalls comes from a documentary, in which an elderly Polish Jew named Dina Abramowicz remembered being 16 years old in Vilna on the day Piłsudski died. Looking into the camera, she said, “We all knew [the Jews] that dark times were ahead because Piłsudski had died.”
Zimmerman believes that those fears were not misplaced. In the interview, he suggested that had Piłsudski lived longer, Hitler might have hesitated to provoke war. “Some say that one of the reasons Hitler waited [to violate borders] is because he knew the only statesman … who had actually intervened to stop him, was Piłsudski,” Zimmerman noted. “I believe if Piłsudski was still alive in 1936 and Germany attempted to rearm the Rhineland … he would have mounted a military action from the east.”
With Piłsudski gone and his warning unheeded, Europe drifted toward appeasement. Within a few years, Hitler rearmed the Rhineland, annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia and launched a war that would engulf the globe — and result in the annihilation of European Jewry.
In addition to his efforts to halt Hitler, Piłsudski had already secured his place in European history by stopping the advance of Soviet communism. In 1920, his forces defeated the Red Army at the gates of Warsaw, a victory that many historians regard as having prevented Bolshevik expansion into Western Europe. It was, as Lord Edgar Vincent, a British statesman, called it, “the eighteenth decisive battle of world civilization.”
Despite these monumental achievements, Piłsudski has largely been forgotten in the West. Why is this so?
This historical neglect, Zimmerman suggests, stems from Poland’s tragic fate in World War II and its subsequent eclipse behind the Iron Curtain. Yet Piłsudski’s legacy endures in the values he championed: national sovereignty, resistance to tyranny and respect for all citizens, regardless of background.
For today’s readers — especially students of history — his story offers a powerful lesson in courage and conviction. “Piłsudski believed that deterring aggression requires strength — through the threat of force, or sometimes even force itself,” Zimmerman said. “Western democracies failed to understand that. He didn’t.”
In Zimmerman’s words, “He should be remembered as the man who defeated Soviet Russia, forged a democratic Poland, stood up for the Jews and tried to stop Hitler — but was ignored.”
Photo Caption: Professor Joshua Zimmerman’s book on Józef Piłsudski. Jacket design by Lisa Roberts.
Photo Credit: Professor Joshua Zimmerman
