Wojciechowski reveals Pilsudski's pro-German attitude, quite contrary to what is usually claimed in Polish nationalist historiography.
One particularly interesting vignette is found in Wojciechowski's description of the Polish-German negotiations leading up to the Declaration of Non-Aggression of 26 January 1934. On page 80 of the German-language version of the book, Wojciechowski describes the interview on 27 November 1933 between Pilsudski and the German ambassador Moltke, at which the German draft of the Declaration was handed over.
Wojciechowski then says the following:
There we have it, straight from the horse's mouth. Pilsudski is openly admitting that the Polish people had hated Germany for 1000 years, ever since the foundation of the Polish state, and that this hatred was the cause of the difficulties between Poland and Germany, not anything that Germany had done.Pilsudski gab dann seinem Wunsch Ausdruck, die polnisch-deutschen Beziehungen auf eine freundschaftliche Ebene zu stellen und sagte: "Der tausendjaehrige Hass des polnischen Volkes gegen Deutschland verursacht grosse Schwierigkeiten bei der Verwirklichung der freundschaftlichen Beziehungen zwischen beiden Laendern. Deswegen wird sich diese Politik auch nicht auf Gefuehle, sondern auf den Verstand stuetzen".
My translation:
Pilsudski then expressed his wish to place Polish-German relationships on a friendly level, and said: "The thousand-year-old hatred of the Polish people for Germany is causing great difficulties in the realisation of friendly relations between the two countries. For that reason this policy will have to be based not on emotions but on reason".
Note that, according to Pilsudski, the hatred of the Polish people for Germany cannot have been a result of the partitions of Poland at the end of the 18th Century, nor of the treatment of ethnic Poles in the German Reich between 1871 and 1918, the reasons usually given for Polish anti-German sentiment. Pilsudski says that Polish hatred for Germany predates those events by several centuries.
Pilsudski was not anti-German, but rather anti-Russian. He could see clearly that the difficult relationship between Poland and Germany was not solely the fault of Germany, but was mainly due to sentiments in the Polish population. What Pilsudski's confession means is that it is historically false to see Poland purely as a victim of German aggression and anti-Polonism; rather, the tragic fate of Poland in the period 1939-1944 was as least as much the result of the centuries-old Polish hatred for Germany, which caused Poland to opt for joining an anti-German alliance when the chance was offered in March 1939.