Henry Ashby Turner

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Henry Ashby Turner, Jr. (born 1932) is an American historian of Germany.

1 Life and Career
2 Scholarship
3 David Abraham Affair
4 Works
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Life and Career

Turner was born in and raised in He received his B.A. from Washington and Lee University in 1954 and spent the 1954-1955 school year as a Fulbright scholar at the Free University of Berlin. In 1955 he began graduate study at Princeton University. He completed his M.A. in 1957 and his Ph.D. in 1960 under the supervision of Gordon A. Craig. Turner was hired by Yale University as an instructor in history in 1958. He was elevated to assistant professor in 1961, associate professor in 1964 and professor in 1971. During his career he has held a number of endowed chairs in history at Yale University and trained many graduate students in modern German history. From 1981 to 1991 Turner also served as master of Davenport College, one of 12 residential colleges at Yale. He retired in 2002 as the Stillé Professor of History. His papers are housed in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University.

[edit] Scholarship

Turner is best known for his book German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, published in 1985. In it he rebuts the Marxist claim that it was German industrialists and big business who primarily financed the Nazi seizure of power and argues that the extent of business support for the Nazis has been much exaggerated. Through a careful examination of the records of major German corporations and of the Nazi Party, Turner established that the bulk of Nazi funds prior to 1933 came from ordinary Germans and that the political parties patronized by big business, in order of greatest to smallest, were the German People's Party, the German National People's Party, the Catholic Center Party; the Nazis were last. Before the election of March 5, 1933 which gave Hitler his "mandate," most of the corporate donations to the Nazis, to the extent they were made, were an "insurance policy," a way of trying to remain in the good graces of the Nazis should they come to power. The only election campaign in which big business generously contributed to the Nazis was the one of 1933, when the Nazis were already in office.

Turner is opposed to the Sonderweg view of German history. In Turner's view, Nazism was a possible but not inevitable result of German history. Turner has argued that there was much contingency in the Weimar period and that in the early 1930s there were four ways Germany could go politically:

Nazi Dictatorship
Communist Dictatorship
Military Dictatorship
Continuation of democracy

In his 1996 book Hitler's Thirty Days To Power: January 1933, Turner presented a case that it was the actions of a few individuals, such as German president Paul von Hindenburg, Franz von Papen, and Kurt von Schleicher, that enabled Adolf Hitler to come to power through semi-legal means. Political incompetence and personal rivalry between Papen and Schleicher ultimately led to Hitler being named chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. To an extent, Hitler's Thirty Days To Power is a response to Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik by Karl Dietrich Bracher.

Turner's most recent book examined the history of General Motors and its European subsidiary Opel under the Nazis. The research for his project was funded primarily by General Motors.

[edit] David Abraham Affair

In the early 1980s, Turner was one of the critics of Princeton professor David Abraham's book, Collapse of the Weimar Republic. Abraham, a Marxist historian trained at the University of Chicago, argued that big business was responsible for Hitler's rise to power. Turner, working on the same topic from a non-Marxist perspective was familiar with the archives and documents cited by Abraham and challenged him, which led to a controversy over citations, translation errors and possible fabrications on Abraham's part.

A letter writing campaign in which Turner was a leading participant led to Abraham's denial of tenure at Princeton. The campaign by University of California, Berkeley historian Gerald D. Feldman ended Abraham's career as a professor of history (though Abraham later became a professor of law). For his part in the controversy, Turner was publicly vilified by prominent Marxist historians such as Arno J. Mayer and Natalie Zemon Davis, both of whom were Abraham's colleagues at Princeton. Turner was supported by historians Gertrude Himmelfarb, Harold James and Timothy Mason among others. Turner has always maintained that his actions were motivated by concerns for professional standards.

[edit] Works

Stresemann and the Politics of the Weimar Republic, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963.
Nazism and the Third Reich, New York: Quadrangle Books, 1972
Reappraisals of Fascism (editor), New York: New Viewpoints, 1975.
Hitler aus nächster Nähe: Aufzeichnungen eines Vertrauten 1929-1932 (editor), Frankfurt/M, Berlin, Wien: Ullstein, 1978.
German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant (editor), New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
The Two Germanies since 1945, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987, republished as
Germany from Partition to Reunification, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
Hitler's Thirty Days to Power: January 1933, Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1996.
General Motors and the Nazis: The Struggle for Control of Opel, Europe's Biggest Carmaker, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

[edit] References

Gerald D. Feldman, "A Collapse in Weimar Scholarship", Central European History 17 (spring 1985).
Klaus Hildebrand, The Third Reich, trans. P.S. Falla, London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1984.
Eberhard Kolb, The Weimar Republic, trans. P.S. Falla, London: Unwin Hyman, 1988.