By Chip Chandler — Digital Content Producer
A new three-part series explores how a model of justice conceived after World War II still has a global impact today.
Dead Reckoning: War, Crime and Justice from WW2 to the War on Terror airs in a three-hour block beginning at 7 p.m. Tuesday.
In the series, directed by Jonathan Silvers, viewers will see how a standard by which all conflicts are judged and how justice has been secured — and occasionally denied — for crimes that continue to plague the world.
However many decades and miles separate those conflicts and however inhumane the underlying crimes, all have been prosecuted according to protocols that the Allies devised for three unique situations: the determination of command responsibility; the pursuit of war criminals; and the accumulation of evidence and testimony at crime scenes.
Each segment of the series investigates a unique postwar event in World War II’s three major theaters: Europe, Asia and the Soviet Bloc. It assembles these pieces into a larger picture, revealing the challenges facing investigators, prosecutors and judges in the years since World War II.
To accomplish this, Dead Reckoning features in-depth analysis of subsequent atrocities and ongoing war crime prosecutions in regions and countries that endured epic struggle: Southeast Asia, the Balkans, Rwanda, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries ravaged by conflict.
Chip Chandler is a digital content producer for Panhandle PBS. He can be contacted at Chip.Chandler@actx.edu, at @chipchandler1 on Twitter and on Facebook.
