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.
Devastating post!
Cornwell is a fraud.
Remember while your flunky is now telling us the files only went up to 1922, the Vatican and the flunky and Cornwell were operating under the assumption Cornwell's book would shed positive light on Pacielli's life.
I doubt the Vatican denied Cornwell much of anything. But he certainly got more than he expected.
Read the book for yourself. It's all there.
And in comparison to the other two books I mentioned written by Jewish historians, Cornwell's book is tame.
For anyone interested, those books are "The Popes Against the Jews: the Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism" by David I. Kertzer, historian and professor of anthropology and Italian studies at Brown University; and "A Moral Reckoning: the Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair" by Daniel Goldhagen, Harvard professor of European Studies and recipient of Germany's Democracy Prize for his earlier book, "Hitler's Willing Executioners."
Both books are available new or used on Amazon.
I thought you might be interested in a few photos of the "dungeon" taken from a virtual tour of the Vatican Secret Archives.
Second Room - Piano Nobile
Third Room - Piano Nobile
In addition, here is a shot of one of the "dungeon like" study rooms:
Study hall of the Vatican Secret Archives