And thus we agree, the figure of "860,000 Jews saved by Pacelli" is not historically supported except by the comments of an Israeli consul to Milan.
That is one of Cornwell's lies.
And thus we agree, the figure of "860,000 Jews saved by Pacelli" is not historically supported except by the comments of an Israeli consul to Milan.
And that is one of your lies.
That's a complete, 100%, absolute, reprehensible, lie.
He had the usual access to the Vatican Archives that any scholar can get by asking for it. According to the logbook, he was there a few times over a period of three weeks. Whoopee.
And when he was publicly challenged by Ronald Rychlak on what he had discovered in the archives, all he could come up with was a juvenile titter about Pius XII's alleged love affair with his housekeeper.
That's the joker you've hitched your star to.
You really DO intend to rob Lapide of claim to be a “reputable historian.”
You are an enemy of truth.
You wrote:
“Cornwell had access to Vatican documents that no man before or since ever had, including Lapide and Yad Vashem.”
Nonsense.
1) Count the mss. that Cornwell actually claims to have examined. The number is puny.
2) Everyone who has wanted it has had access to the same documents.
3) People before Cornwell saw most if not all of the same documents.
4) Cornwell even lied about how many times he VISITED the archives.
Unsurprisingly, you are wrong again:
What, then, did Cornwell find in the "long-buried Vatican files"? The supposedly "new" information Cornwell presents comes from two letters of Pius written in 1918 and 1919— before Hitler even began his political career.
But let's begin at the beginning.
As Cornwell's narrative opens, he is already protesting too much. He tells us he decided to study Pius XII's role in World War II "convinced, as I had always been, of his innocence" because he wanted "to write a new defense of his reputation for a younger generation." In short, Cornwell is presenting himself as an objective observer, taking up this project wishing to defend Pius only to be bowled over by powerful, unexpected evidence which overwhelmed his initial resolve....
"I applied for access to archival material in the Vatican," Cornwell tells us, "reassuring those who had charge of crucial documents that I was on the side of my subject." Ah! — a reader may think — that's how Cornwell got into the Vatican archives, by tricking them into giving him a pass! But here, too, Cornwell is misleading. Today any qualified scholar can obtain access to the Vatican's archives to do scholarly research. None has to pass a test or profess beforehand that they will be "favorable" or "unfavorable" to any pontiff or ecclesiastic — only that they will report accurately what they find.
In May of 1997, Cornwell (like other scholars before and since) was admitted into the Vatican Secret Archives. This is how he describes the experience: "For months on end I ransacked Pacelli's files, which dated back to 1912. in a windowless dungeon beneath the Borgia Tower in Vatican City..." (My God! — an unsuspecting reader might think — What an adventure! Working in a dungeon(!),feverishly rifling through top secret files, just a few feet below the room where the Borgias committed unspeakable crimes! What an intrepid hero of truth!) But the fact is, the archive is not a dungeon, just an underground vault where files are stored. And when Cornwell writes that he "ransacked" Pacelli's files (leading us to believe he was all alone pawing through boxes of secret documents), he omits telling us that an archivist was there to bring him the files he requested.
And when he tells us that the Pacelli files he was "ransacking" went "back to 1912," he omits telling us the archives he was "ransacking" ran forward up until only... 1922. That is, he gives his readers the impression that he "ransacked the files" from 1912 to 1958, the year Pius died, including the crucial years of World War II; but the only files he "ransacked" were those from 1912-1922.
Why is this important? Why does Cornwell carefully omit these points? It seems clear that he does so to conceal the fact that the documents he "ransacked" contain nothing whatsoever about the matters which interest him — Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust.
There are other peculiarities in Cornwell's account of his labors. For example, the length of time he spent in the archives. Cornwell tells us it was "months on end." But a memorandum from Archbishop Re, (the "Sostituto" or Deputy Vatican Secretary of State), obtained by Inside the Vatican, reveals that Cornwell was given a pass to the archives for... three weeks. It would appear, then, that "months on end" is Cromwell's way of describing a few days at the end of May and a few more at the beginning of June. A slight exaggeration.