Editing Alfred P. Sloan (section)

===Nazi collaboration===
{{main|History of General Motors#Nazi collaboration}}

In August 1938, a senior executive for General Motors, [[James D. Mooney]], received the [[Grand Cross of the German Eagle]] for his distinguished service to the [[Nazi Germany|Reich]]. "Nazi armaments chief [[Albert Speer]] told a congressional investigator that Germany could not have attempted its September 1939 [[blitzkrieg]] of Poland without the performance-boosting additive technology provided by Alfred P. Sloan and General Motors".<ref name="wpost-30nov98">{{Cite news |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/nov98/nazicars30.htm |last=Dobbs |first=Michael |title=Ford and GM Scrutinized for Alleged Nazi Collaboration |newspaper=[[The Washington Post]] |date=1998-11-30 |access-date=2009-06-01}}</ref><ref name=carmaker>{{cite news |last=Black, Edwin |url=http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/31057/hitler-s-carmaker/ |title=Hitler's Carmaker: How General Motors helped mobilize the Third Reich |newspaper=J Weekly |date=2006-12-01 |access-date=2015-05-05}}</ref><ref>Higham, Charles ''Trading with the Enemy''. New York: Doubleday, 1982</ref> During the war, GM's Opel Brandenburg facilities produced [[Junkers Ju 88|Ju 88]] bombers, [[truck]]s, [[land mine]]s and [[torpedo]] [[detonator]]s for Nazi Germany.<ref name=carmaker /> Charles Levinson, formerly deputy director of the European office of the [[Congress of Industrial Organizations|CIO]], alleged that Sloan remained on the board of [[Opel]].<ref>{{cite web|url=http://libcom.org/library/allied-multinationals-supply-nazi-germany-world-war-2 |title=How the Allied multinationals supplied Nazi Germany throughout World War II |publisher=libcom.org |access-date=2009-06-18 |year=2006 |last=Marriott, Red}}  Excerpted from Higham, Charles. ''Trading with the Enemy - The Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949'' New York: Doubleday, 1982.</ref>

Sloan's memoir presents a different picture of Opel's wartime role.<ref name="Sloan1964pp328-337">{{Harvnb|Sloan|1964|pp=328–337}}.</ref> According to Sloan, Opel was [[nationalization|nationalized]], along with most other industrial activity owned or co-owned by foreign interests, by the German state soon after the outbreak of war.<ref name="Sloan1964pp330-331">{{Harvnb|Sloan|1964|pp=330–331}}.</ref> But Opel was never factually nationalized and the GM-appointed directors and management remained unchanged throughout the  Nazi period including the war, dealing with other GM companies in Axis and Allied countries including the United States.<ref name="woodwood">{{cite book |editor1-last=Wood |editor1-first=John C. |editor2-last=Wood |editor2-first=Michael C. |date= December 9, 2003 |title=Alfred P. Sloan: Critical Evaluations in Business and Management |publisher= [[Routledge]] |page= 382 |isbn= 978-0415248327}}</ref> Sloan presents Opel at the end of the war as a black box to GM's American management, an organization with which the Americans had had no contact for five years. According to Sloan, GM in Detroit debated whether to even try to run Opel in the postwar era, or to leave to the interim West German government the question of who would pick up the pieces.<ref name="Sloan1964pp328-337"/>

Defending the German investment strategy as "highly profitable", Sloan told shareholders in 1939 that GM's continued industrial production for the Nazi government was merely sound business practice. In a letter to a concerned shareholder, Sloan said that the manner in which the Nazi government ran Germany "should not be considered the business of the management of General Motors.&nbsp;... We must conduct ourselves as a German organization.&nbsp;... We have no right to shut down the plant."<ref name="wpost-30nov98"/>