Henry Ashby Turner, the historian who was one of the twentieth century’s leading experts on the Nazis’ rise to power and whose challenge to the theory that German industrialists were complicit in that rise led to one of modern academia’s most heated and even vicious debates, has died in New Haven, Connecticut at age 76. The cause was complications from melanoma. As a New York Times obituary by William Grimes details, Prof. Turner — he taught at Yale for 44 years — wrote numerous well-received books, but his best known was German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, which argued that, contrary to the received wisdom, German industrialists did not support Adolf Hitler, and were in fact “alarmed by Hitler’s anti-capitalist tirades” and the Reich’s general destabilization of not only the country but foreign markets. The book was in part a response to The Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis by a young Marxist at Princeton named David Abraham, “who argued that German businessmen had assumed the role of Hitler’s principal backers to suppress the working-class movement and ensure their own survival.” But Turner went further than writing an opposing book: he “accused Mr. Abraham of distorting and in some cases falsifying archival data to suit his argument, touching off a ferocious debate that embroiled eminent scholars in the United States and Germany,” and eventually forced Abraham out of the profession amidst accusations of “scholarly felonies.” As Grimes notes, it was, for Turner, “a tempestuous interlude in an otherwise quiet scholarly life.”