The Communist Party was incapable of recognizing the catastrophic defeat that had taken place; they simply talked wildly of a new revolutionary upswing. Their organization had been smashed to pieces and yet the Comintern declared:
The current calm after the victory of fascism is only temporary. Inevitably, despite fascist terrorism, the revolutionary tide in Germany will grow…The establishment of an open fascist dictatorship, which is destroying all democratic illusions amongst the masses(!) and freeing them(!) from the influence of the Social Democrats, will speed up Germany’s progress towards the proletarian revolution.
The Stalinists proved incapable of distinguishing between revolution and counter-revolution. They simply continued as though nothing fundamental had happened. Despite the fact that the SPD was banned, its leaders imprisoned and its organizations wrecked, the German Communists still declared that the “social fascists” were the main enemy! The KPD Central Committee at the end of May declared:
“The total removal of the social fascists from the state machine and the brutal suppression of the Social Democratic organizations and their press can do nothing to change the fact that the Social Democrats were, and still remain the chief prop of capitalist dictatorship.” (My emphasis – RS)
They were oblivious to the consequences of this crushing defeat. They were oblivious to their erroneous policies which had split the labour movement and led to this disaster. On the contrary, the Comintern Executive met in April and noted, “The political line and the organizational policy followed by the Central Committee of the German Communist Party up to and during Hitler’s coup was perfectly correct.” The degenerate Comintern simply asserted that black was white, and described its German policy as a “resounding success”! As with the Second International in 1914, so now, the Stalinist Third International had become “a stinking corpse”.
Trotsky realized the scale of the defeat – probably the worst in history which put the betrayal of the labour leaders of 1914 into the shade. The perspective of world war opened up as Hitler feverishly undertook a massive rearmaments programme with the backing of British imperialism.