The quote in question, featured in the wiki page on Hitler's rise to power, comes from Alan Bullock's 1962 biography Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. The full quote in question is as follows:

The inability of the German parties to combine in support of the Republic had bedevilled German politics since 1930, when Brüning had found it no longer possible to secure a stable majority in the Reichstag or at the elections. The Communists openly announced that they would prefer to see the Nazis in power rather than lift a finger to save the Republic. Despite the violence of the clashes on the streets, the Communist leaders followed a policy approved by Moscow which gave priority to the elimination of the Social Democrats as the rival working-class party.

Bullock placed this intra-left bickering within a larger thesis that Hitler rose to power in 1933 through a bit of luck and "bad judgement" of his Weimar political rivals. Bullock's thesis has a degree of accuracy to it, but it is somewhat deceptive. The KPD leadership's failures in the run-up to Hitler's ascent to the chancellorship were a bit more complicated than simple inaction.

The public line espoused by KPD chief Ernst Thälmann was that the NSDAP's political rise was due to capitalism reaching its terminal phase. In this Marxist-Leninist schema, fascism was a reaction to the inevitable proletarian uprising in which monopoly capital would use fascist ruffians to stave off the inevitable collapse of capitalism. Paramilitary violence would run hand in hand with the defense of the old order through appeals to bourgeois norms of respectability and the need for law and order. The latter aspect of this theory explains why many within the KPD labeled the SPD and other Weimar leftists as "social fascists" in that they lacked a firm commitment to the revolution. The November 1932 election brought these KPD attacks on the SPD to the fore in which Thälmann and other KPD firebrands attacked the SPD as would-be fascists and props of the bourgeois order that was diametrically opposed to the interests of the proletariat.

So KPD inaction within this context was less about having the NSDAP in power than it was about preparing the grounds for the much promised Communist revolution in Germany. Thälmann and other KPD leaders would assure their constituents that a Hitler government would be a temporary affair in which the fragile coalition that brought fascism to power would fall apart under the weight of its own contradictions. Moreover, the KPD's leaders and propaganda organs all held that Hitler would not be able to resolve the problems of mass unemployment or the Depression.

Stalin and the orders from the Comintern certainly greased the wheels for this approach by the KPD. Moscow had discouraged a close relationship between the KPD and SPD for much of Weimar, partly for reasons of Marxist-Leninist ideology, but also for Realpolitik. A KPD-SPD political alliance could threaten the USSR's alliance with France, but also be strong enough to be independent from Soviet tutelage. Many commentators in Weimar and after blamed Moscow and the KPD's apparent slavish adherence to Comintern directives for the KPD's ignominious failure in 1933. Bullock not surprisingly picked up on this line of argumentation.

Yet, although Soviet responsibility for the KPD's policies was great, there was more to the KPD's actions in the terminal phase of the Republic than following Moscow. For one thing, the KPD's leaders and a good deal of its rank and file needed little persuasion to convince them that the SPD were not natural allies of the KPD. For one thing, the SPD had made alliance with the German right against the German left before. The SPD Defense Minister Gustav Noske was complicit in the murder of communist revolutionaries Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in 1919. Noske acted in conjunction with the paramilitary Freikorps to restore order. Added to this, various SPD government officials and governments had supported the forceful repression of the KPD in the name of law and order throughout the 1920s. More recently, the SPD party and its voters had backed Paul von Hindenburg in the March/April 1932 presidential elections. Thälmann too had run as a candidate in this election, but the SPD and the center-right Catholic Centre Party supported von Hindenburg. The rationale for this SPD-Centre alliance was that von Hindenburg was better than a Hitler presidency, but the message to the KPD was that a somewhat reactionary scion of the old Kaiserreich was a preferable national leader than Thälmann.

So there was a great deal of bad blood between the SPD and KPD that would have existed in spite of Moscow's directives. These tensions contributed to the political paralysis Bullock described in his 1962 Hitler biography. Thälmann himself likely realized the mistakes of the KPD when it was obvious that Hitler's dictatorship could pose a real danger to the KPD. There was a clear change in the tune of KPD pronouncements and internal discussions throughout February 1933. These sometimes took the form of belated olive branches to the KPD, albeit often with a dose of blaming their would-be allies for the current situation. But it was too late. There was little that an SPD-KPD united front could accomplish when its leadership was divided and mistrusted each other.

So the KPD's response to Hitler was less one of lethargic inaction, but a series of missteps and miscalculations on the part of the KPD's leaders. Moscow added fuel to an already simmering conflict within the German left that preceded Hitler's 1933 ascent by over a decade. Ideological blinkers further convinced the KPD that the tide of history was on their side and there was no way Hitler could win over the working masses over the long-term. Thälmann and his contemporaries did not see a NSDAP-led government as preferable to the Republic, but rather a stepping stone to continue a revolution that they believed had been suppressed by a coalition of the bourgeois left and right in 1919. In this case, the KPD's actions in the latter stage of the Republic were, to paraphrase one of Tallerand's supposed aphorisms, worse than a crime. They were a mistake.

Sources

Epstein, Catherine. The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and Their Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Lemmons, Russel. Hitler's Rival: Ernst Thälmann in Myth and Memory. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013.

Weitz, Eric D. Creating German Communism, 1890-1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.