Editing Yugoslav Partisans (section)

===Atrocities===
The Partisans massacred civilians during and after the war.<ref>{{harvnb|Jonassohn|Björnson|1998|p=285}}: "There is no doubt that Partisans participated in the massacre of civilians during and after the war"</ref> On 27 July 1941, Partisan-led units massacred around 100 Croat civilians in [[Bosansko Grahovo massacre|Bosansko Grahovo]] and 300 in [[Trubar massacre|Trubar]] during the [[Drvar uprising]] against the NDH.{{citation needed|date=March 2025}} Between 5–8 September 1941, some 1,000–3,000 Muslim civilians and soldiers, including 100 Croats were massacred by the Partisan Drvar Brigade.{{sfn|Hoare|2006|pp=106–108}} A number of Partisan units, and the local population in some areas, engaged in [[Allied war crimes during World War II#Yugoslavia|mass murder]] in the immediate postwar period against [[POW]]s and other perceived Axis sympathizers, collaborators, and/or fascists along with their relatives, including children.{{citation needed|date=March 2023}} These infamous massacres include the [[Foibe massacres]], [[Tezno massacre]], [[Macelj massacre]], [[Kočevski Rog massacre]], [[Barbara Pit massacre]] and the [[communist purges in Serbia in 1944–45]].

The [[Bleiburg repatriations]] of retreating columns of the [[Armed Forces of the Independent State of Croatia]], [[Chetnik]] and [[Slovene Home Guard]] troops, thousands of civilians heading or retreating towards Austria to surrender to western Allied forces, resulted in mass executions with tens of thousands of victims.<ref name=":9">{{Cite book |last=Moore |first=Bob |url=https://academic.oup.com/book/43087 |title=Prisoners of War: Europe: 1939-1956 |date=2022-05-05 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-187597-7 |language=en |doi=10.1093/oso/9780198840398.001.0001}}</ref>{{Rp|page=281}} The "foibe massacres" draw their name from the "foibe" pits in which Croatian Partisans of the [[8th Dalmatian Corps]] (often along with groups of angry civilian locals) shot Italian fascists, and suspected collaborationists and/or separatists. According to a mixed Slovene-Italian historical commission<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.kozina.com/premik/indexeng_porocilo.htm|title=Slovene-Italian historical commission|publisher=Kozina.com|access-date=19 November 2011|archive-date=8 April 2008|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080408133844/http://www.kozina.com/premik/indexeng_porocilo.htm|url-status=dead}}</ref> established in 1993, which investigated only on what happened in places included in present-day Italy and Slovenia, the killings seemed to proceed from endeavors to remove persons linked with fascism (regardless of their personal responsibility), and endeavors to carry out mass executions of real, potential or only alleged opponents of the communist government. The [[1944–1945 killings in Bačka]] were similar in nature and entailed the killing of suspected Hungarian, German and Serbian fascists, and their suspected affiliates, without regard to their personal responsibility. During this purge, a large number of civilians from the associated ethnic group were also killed.{{sfn|Matuska|1991|p=}}{{page needed|date=February 2020}}

The Partisans did not have an official agenda of liquidating their enemies and their cardinal ideal was the "[[brotherhood and unity]]" of all Yugoslav nations (the phrase became the motto for the new Yugoslavia). The country suffered between 900,000 and 1,150,000 civilian and military dead during the Axis occupation.{{sfn|Tomasevich|2001|p=737}} Between 80,000 and 100,000 people were killed in the partisan purges and at least 30,000 people were killed in the Bleiburg killings, according to Marcus Tanner in his work, ''Croatia: a Nation Forged in War''.{{Full citation needed|date=March 2023}}

This chapter of Partisan history was a taboo subject for conversation in the [[SFR Yugoslavia]] until the late 1980s, and as a result, decades of official silence created a reaction in the form of numerous data manipulation for nationalist propaganda purposes.{{sfn|MacDonald|2002|p=}}