Official in what sense? If we look at the Yugoslav Partisan Resistance, they were officially recognized as the military force of the Allied Yugoslavia at the Tehran Conference in 1943. How much more "official" should they have been? And as I have mentioned before, in 1944 they grew into an army of almost 1 million men who fought in conventional battles. So, if your logic is correct, the partisans who died before 1943 are somehow not soldiers, while the ones that died after the official recognicion were soldiers? A soldier is defined by a piece of paper?
What about the battles that occured from 1941 to 1943 in Yugoslavia? They were not fought by soldiers?
Generally, soldiers doing their duty are not held accountable to the same standards as their officiers nor like civilians.
Umm..do you think the Nazis really cared much about that? Why would they send innocent people into concentration camps, execute innocent hostages that they randomly chose from the civilian population and move 100s of thousands of people out of the country by force then? What sort of standards were those?
But anyway, why such an obsession with formality?
Guerilla activities tend to be directed against the own state, while partisan activity has happened as part of a greater war and has always been directed at an occupying, foreign force.
But you do agree that any armed person who fights in a war is a soldier? Or are you like Thunderhawk and think that if it's not on paper, then it can't be true?
"Nations ... as an inherent political destiny, are a myth. Nationalism, which sometimes takes preexisting cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates preexisting cultures: that is a reality." - E. Gellner