When one option is live under a brutal dictator and the other option is have your ethnicity wiped off the face of the Earth, there isn’t really an option, is there?

You’re still missing the point. The people living there, at that time, didn’t know what those options would ultimately lead to. They didn’t have the benefit of hindsight. And even if they did, they were right there at that moment in time, having to make decisions that would determine if they survived one more day.

Basically every death in the European Theatre of WW2 can be directly blamed on Hitler and the Nazis for starting the whole thing

Poor Stalin, I guess he had absolutely no choice in all the massacring that he did. Hitler made him do it.