Henry Ashby Turner, Jr. (April 4, 1932 – December 17, 2008) was an American historian of Germany who was a professor at Yale University for over forty years. He is best known for his book German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (1985) in which he challenged the common theory that industrialists in Germany were the Nazi Party’s most influential supporters. Life and career Turner was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and attended public schools in Maryland. He received his B.A. from Washington and Lee University in 1954 and spent the 1954-1955 academic year as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Munich and the Free University of Berlin in Germany. In the fall of 1955, Turner 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. From 1976 to 1979 he was chairman of the Yale History Department. During his career he held a number of endowed chairs in history at Yale and trained numerous 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. Turner 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 . He died from complications from melanoma on December 17, 2008, at Yale-New Haven Hospital. Scholarship In his essay "Fascism and Modernization" from the book Reappraisals of Fascism, following the arguments first made by David Schoenbaum, Turner argued National Socialism sought the total destruction of modern industrial society and its replacement with an agrarian society. Germans would obtain that land, or Lebensraum, in Eastern Europe, where German colonists would settle and reduce the indigenous Slavic people to slaves. However, to accomplish these goals the Nazis, despite the nature against modernism of their ideology, were forced to modernize German society further. Turner called Nazi anti-modernism a "double" form of utopianism in that it was a vision that was both impractical and unachievable. Turner is best known for his book German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, published in 1985, in which he rebutted the claim that it was German big