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Henry Turner, 76, Historian and Author, Is Dead

Henry Ashby Turner, a leading historian whose book “German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler” (1985) challenged the widely held theory that German industrialists were the Nazi Party’s most influential supporters and embroiled him in a fierce scholarly debate, died Dec. 17 in New Haven, Conn. He was 76 and lived in New Haven.

The cause was complications of melanoma, said his son Matthew.

Mr. Turner, who taught at Yale for 44 years, published several important works on modern Germany, including “Stresemann and the Politics of the Weimar Republic” (1963), a study of Gustav Stresemann, the liberal statesman who served as Germany’s chancellor and foreign minister in the 1920s, and “Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power” (1996).

He was best known, however, for “German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler,” which marshaled a wealth of archival information to argue that German industrialists had contributed far less to the Nazi Party than previously thought.
Read entire article at NYT