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The Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis

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A recent online interview with Ward Churchill, who has also been falsely accused of poor scholarship in order to discredit him, points out that the charges made by Turner against Abraham, a senior professor against a young professor, were due to the book coming out before Turner's grand opus on the subject, with conclusions that contradicted what Turner was trying to argue. Turner and others set grad students to comb through the sources line by line, finding errors in a few technical details, but nothing to discredit the substance of the findings or the integrity of the research. German historians have apparently sided with Abraham's account. The university press originally withdrew the book, then reinstated it once it became clear the charges were overblown. But Abraham's career as a historian was ruined.

Before reading this book, you may want to look into the controversy that surrounds it. When the book was first published there were numerous academic debates concerning it's content. It is something to look into.

In 1981 the Princeton historian David Abraham published The Collapse of the Weimar Republic. The book, which was initially well received in academia, sought to demonstrate a connection between "organized capitalism" and the rise of the Nazi party during the Great Depression. While Abraham avoided the simplistic equation of capitalism and fascism, his structuralist-Marxist approach could not accommodate the findings of the Yale historian Henry Turner, whose prior articles successfully disproved the suggestion that German industry, before 1933, supported Hitler to any great extent, either financially or ideologically. When researchers checked the accuracy of Abraham's evidence, they found a number of serious errors in his footnotes. Abraham cited documents that did not exist and turned paraphrases into quotes.