Rapacki was born in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary on 24 December 1909. He was a member of the Polish Socialist Party from 1945 to 1948 as well as its successor, the Polish United Workers' Party. He was also a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee up until 1968, on board as the minister of seafaring and the minister of higher education and research. From 1956 to 1968, he was the foreign minister in the cabinet of Józef Cyrankiewicz. As a Foreign Minister, he was especially close to the director-general of the Foreign Ministry, Przemysław Ogrodziński, a man whose background as a socialist turned communist was precisely as same as his, and who served as his principle adviser. As the Foreign Minister, Rapacki was considered be one of the leaders of the liberalising wing of the United Workers' Party, known for favoring easing repression and censorship, which gave him a certain popularity. The Radio Free Europeradio station owned by the U.S government had making claims all through the 1950s that the United States stood behind the "rollback" of Communism, promising the peoples of Eastern Europe that if they only rose up against their Communist regimes, the United States would intervene with military force. In 1956, the people of Hungary followed the advice of Radio Free Europe and rose up, only to be crushed by the Red Army with the United State did not intervene out of the fear of causing a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. From the Polish perspective, the hollowness of the claims of Radio Free Europe together with crushing of the Hungarian uprising showed there was no point in trying to overthrow the Communist regime, and the best that could be done at present was to improve the present regime. At the same time, the Polish October uprising, which seen the Stalinist leadership in Warsaw overthrown by a reformist faction of the United Workers's People over the face of Soviet objections gave hope that Poland was to be more independent. One of the principle concerns of Polish foreign policy in the 1950s was the rejection by the West German government of the Oder-Neisse line as Germany's eastern frontier and together with that rejection the claim that all of the areas of Poland that had been part of Germany in 1937 were being illegally occupied by Poland. In 1955, at a meeting of the NATO Council, the West German government requested that the Bundeswehr be armed with nuclear weapons, a request that caused much alarm in Warsaw. The 1956 Suez war revealed the unity of the western states were less than what it had proclaimed, and certainly gave Rapacki hope that disagreements between Great Britain and France on one side and the United States might be exploited by Polish diplomacy to achieve its goals, the most important of which was to prevent West Germany from acquiring nuclear weapons that might be used against Poland one day. On 2 October 1957, he presented at the United Nations his plan for a nuclear-free zone in Central Europe — known as the "Rapacki Plan". Rapacki died in Warsaw, aged 60, on 10 October 1970.
