Historian Henry Ashby Turner, Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1932. He received a bachelor's degree from Washington and Lee University in 1954. He attended the University of Munich and the Free University of Berlin on his way to receiving a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1960. He taught at Yale University for 44 years. He wrote numerous books about Germany including Stresemann and the Politics of the Weimar Republic (1963), German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (1985), Hitler's Thirty Days to Power (1996), and General Motors and the Nazis: The Struggle for Control of Opel, Europe's Biggest Carmaker (2005). He died from complications of melanoma on December 17, 2008 at the age… of 76.