Trotsky on Nazi Germany, the Wehrmacht and WWII

Two interesting pieces on the website of MIM (yeah, yeah, I know, bear with me...):

Leon Trotsky
"The Twin-Star: Hitler-Stalin"
End of November or beginning of December, 1939
(NY: Merit Publishers, 1969), p. 17.

"His probable participation in the war on the side of the Third Reich,
Stalin covers with a promise to 'sovietize' Germany. . . .

"The idea of Stalin's sovietizing Germany is as absurd as Chamberlain's
hope for the restoration of a peaceful conservative monarchy there. Only
a new world coalition can crush the German army through
a war of unheard-of-proportions. The totalitarian regime can be
crushed only by a tremendous attack on the part of the German
workers. They will carry out their revolution, surely, not in order
to replace Hitler with a Hohenzollern or Stalin.

"The victory of the popular masses over the Nazi tyranny will
be one of the greatest explosions in world history and will
immediately change the face of Europe."

[Why the above quote was wrong: Stalin did not side with Hitler;
Stalin did Sovietize Germany, "East Germany," and German "workers,"
which were not a proletariat, did not rise up in socialist revolution.
In fact, they did not even overthrow Hitler to replace him with another
bourgeois.]

http://web.archive.org/web/200611290...izegermans.txt

Leon Trotsky
"On the Future of Hitler's Armies"
Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939-40)
(NY: Merit Publishers, 1969), p. 113.

"Hitler's soldiers are German workers and peasants. . . .

"The armies of occupation must live side by side with the conquered
peoples; they must observe the impoverishment and despair of the
toiling masses; they must observe the latter's attempts at
resistance and protest, at first muffled and then more
and more open and bold. . . .

"The German soldiers, that is, the workers and peasants,
will in the majority of cases have far more sympathy for the
vanquished peoples than for their own ruling caste. The
necessity to act at every step in the capacity of 'pacifiers'
and oppressors will swiftly disintegrate the armies of occupation,
infecting them with a revolutionary spirit." --1940

[Why the above quote was wrong: In World War II, Germans soldiers massacred more
civilians than any previous army in history. They never gained
a revolutionary attitude and did not even overthrow Hitler.

In the range of criminal intention and massive delusion,
this bit from Trotsky falls in the category of his massive
delusion, one that he had his whole life from
1923 onwards, and one that enabled him to fantasize about riding into
Moscow on top German tanks and then instigating revolution in
both Germany and the USSR simultaneously. His inaccurate appraisal of the German
military is another reason he deserved his death for promoting
civil war in the USSR just as the Nazis were poised to invade.
Trotsky's assumption that the Nazi army would not take advantage
of a civil war in the USSR and massacre Soviet citizens turned
out to be plain wrong.]

http://web.archive.org/web/200801280...naziarmies.txt

I was wondering about the sourcing of some of these statements. For example, this bit:

"The idea of Stalin's sovietizing Germany is as absurd as Chamberlain's
hope for the restoration of a peaceful conservative monarchy there. Only
a new world coalition can crush the German army through
a war of unheard-of-proportions. The totalitarian regime can be
crushed only by a tremendous attack on the part of the German
workers. They will carry out their revolution, surely, not in order
to replace Hitler with a Hohenzollern or Stalin.

An ETOL article mentions this quote, but only cites the bold part.

As for the statements on the German army, I could only find part of it on Wikiquote.

Does anyone know anything more about these statements? If true, they are pretty telling about Trotsky's ideas in 1939 and 1940. But I hesitate to use them when the only source is MIM, who only make this interpretation to press their own third worldist point that there are no workers in Germany at all...

Well it does beg the question over whether the german workers were friends or enemies of the international proletariat. The clear answer is no.

In any case, unless MIM provided a citation, I wouldn't use it.

Clear answer? Well, it certainly wasn't the German bourgeoisie who were in the field doing the dirty work, they "only" had to plan and incite it. But to say that imperialism, fascism, oppression, etc. are the fault of the workers is just the typical petty-bourgeois radicalism of MIM and others. An ideology that is not an option for anyone claiming to be marxist or anti-revisionist.

They did provide a source, but I obviously can't access it. I just like getting things first-hand. Otherwise, you get situations comparable to the ridiculous "bad-ass Stalin quotes" (to kill one million is a statistic, blah blah) that are all over the internet and popular culture, but which he never made.