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.]