Henry Ashby Turner - Scholarship

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 in which Germans would obtain Lebensraum in Eastern Europe where German colonists would settle the land and reduce the Slavic peoples to slaves. However to accomplish these goals, the Nazis forced despite the anti-modernist nature of their ideology to further modernize German society. 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 it he rebutted the claim that it was German big business which primarily financed and otherwise promoted the attainment of power by Adolf Hitler. He argued that the extent of business support for Hitler and his Nazi Party had been much exaggerated. On the basis of careful examination of unpublished records of major German corporations and of Hitler's party, Turner concluded that the bulk of the Nazis' funds during their rise came from their party's members and other ordinary Germans and that the principal political recipients of big business funding were the traditional right-of-center parties, the German People's Party and the German National People's Party. The only election campaign in which big business contributed significant amounts of money to the Nazis was that of March 5, 1933, after they were already in power

In Turner's view, the Third Reich was a possible but by no means inevitable result of German history, thus leading Turner to oppose the Sonderweg thesis. He has contended that the acquisition of power by Adolf Hitler was heavily influenced by contingency and that military rule was a viable alternative to the Third Reich. In his 1996 book Hitler's Thirty Days To Power: January 1933, he maintained that it was the actions of a few individuals, such as German president Paul von Hindenburg and chancellors Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher, which enabled Hitler to come to power through semi-legal means. Political incompetence and personal rivalry between Papen and Schleicher ultimately led to Hitler's being appointed chancellor of Germany by President Hindenburg on January 30, 1933, without ever having won a majority in a national election.

Turner's General Motors and the Nazis (2005) examined the history during the Third Reich of Adam Opel AG, the German subsidiary of General Motors.