"It is impossible to understand how the Second World War began outside of the role played by the dominant parties within the working class internationally, and particularly in Germany. The rise of Hitler and the Nazis was, in the final analysis, the product of the betrayals carried out by both German Social Democracy (SPD) and the Stalinist Communist Party, which repeatedly worked to paralyze the revolutionary strivings of the German working class.
It was Hitler’s coming to power in Germany without a shot being fired and the refusal of the Third International under the leadership of Stalin to even discuss this historic defeat that led Leon Trotsky, who had waged an implacable decade-long struggle against Stalinism, to declare the Third International dead for the purposes of socialist revolution. A new Fourth International had to be founded and built as the world party of socialist revolution."