Partisan resistance fighters were "just as bad" as the Nazis and Fascists?

To be honest, this assertion is quite dumb. The Soviet and Eastern bloc states as well as Yugoslavia valorized the partisan war and sanitized it. These official memories removed the complexities of the conflict and the presented the partisans as a uniform mass united in opposition to Hitler and his allies. This legacy of wartime resistance continued in the post-1989 period as wartime suffering and resistance still remains a usable past for many post-communist states such as Poland.

Historians of the partisan war have done much to disentangle these mythologies to reveal a much more nuanced story of events. The ideological goals of the partisans was often quite complex and varied by region. Inter-partisan fighting was not uncommon, especially in ethnic borderlands or other contended territories. The partisans themselves fought a very nasty form of warfare and used tactics that do not lend themselves well to those with a weak stomach.

But the partisans did not start this war. In many cases, the extremism of the fight behind the lines was a direct consequence of the extremism of the Third Reich and its allies. The Germans plotted the systematic extermination of select minority and political groups, requisitioned massive amounts of food to feed its armies and the Reich, played ethnic games pitting minorities against each other, and instituted a whole host of draconian measures against the civilian population for any perceived resistance. And these were official policies of the Third Reich. There was also significant unofficial brutality committed by German troops. The Barbarossa Decree of 1941 not only stated that Germans had the right to summarily execute communist officials, but also that regular military justice did not apply to crimes that did not interfere with military operations. Crimes ranging from theft to rape and murder were endemic within the Wehrmacht and encouraged by the ideology of the Third Reich and its leaders.

And this is why these equivocations between resistance and the Nazis is Quatsch. The partisans fought a brutal war, but they did not create many of the conditions that made this war behind the lines so brutal. The Germans were responsible for that. Moreover, for all the crimes of communism, it was a livable ideology. The imposition of communist governments over Eastern Europe supported by Soviet armies was hardly a humane event in human history, but people survived. Thankfully defeat prevented the Third Reich from completing its plans, but a victorious Nazism envisioned a genocide that would have been even more expansive than the one it actually achieved as it lost the war. The postwar communist dictatorships trampled on civil liberties and could be indifferent to the hardships of its citizens, but communism never claimed that certain peoples and nations did not have a right to exist. Ethnic repression under communism tended to involve population transfers and discrimination, not wholesale extermination. The Eastern bloc's planned economy might have been inefficient, but it was not a system designed to wring the most wealth out of occupied areas; many Soviet citizens in the 1960s and 70s were dismayed that the standard of living in the Warsaw Pact states was actually a tad higher than life in the USSR. Eastern Europeans and Soviets could survive communism. Nazism was a different kettle of fish where the category of ethnic undesirables proved quite fluid and extreme violence was a normal tool of the state.

To draw parallels between the two systems to discredit both is historically unsound. It conflates German policies of active and extreme genocide with the more complicated events like the Holodomor. It insults the victims of both systems because such equivocation does not really care about the real people impacted by these ideologies. The focus on raw numbers demonstrates little empathy for those who suffered under communism, but rather uses these (inflated) death tolls to score political points in the present.