The most dangerous people aren’t those who reject morality—they’re intelligent people who use reason to justify terrible things. This philosophical dialogue series explores that uncomfortable reality through Season 1’s interrogation of Nazi officer Henrik Müller by Soviet interrogator Yuri Antonov.
While studying WW2 history, I wondered what Soviet interrogations of Nazi officers actually looked like. Turns out those records are locked in Russian archives until at least 2044, and the real interrogations likely contained a fair amount of torture and were probably less about genuine understanding than they were about extracting information.
But that gap became an opportunity to create something that intersected my interests in philosophy, history, politics, and storytelling—a fictional dialogue set in a historically significant moment, designed to explore the deeper philosophical questions about how intelligent people construct justifications for participating in atrocity.
The Question That Started Everything
What if a Soviet interrogation had been conducted not as brutal extraction, but as genuine philosophical dialogue between two intelligent men with completely opposed worldviews who can’t escape into abstraction but must genuinely engage with each other’s moral logic?
Not the procedural Q&A of a trial. Not torture aimed at breaking someone. But the philosophical wrestling match between interrogator and prisoner. The moment when “just following orders” collides with “you chose to follow them.” The escalating tension as both men realize they’re arguing about the nature of truth, responsibility, and justice itself.
The historical record gives us fragments—trial transcripts, secondary accounts, the occasional published interview. But these read like medical reports: technically accurate, utterly bloodless. They tell us what was said, but they’re drained of the psychological warfare, the moral stakes, the raw human struggle that must have been happening beneath every exchange.
So I decided to create the conversation that never happened—but perhaps should have.
A Note on Research
I should be clear: I’m not a historian. My engagement with this history came through documentaries, articles, and books—the kind of casual interest that leads you down rabbit holes rather than systematic research.
But I wasn’t trying to recreate actual interrogations anyway. Historical interrogations served their purposes—gathering evidence, extracting confessions, establishing facts for trials or propaganda. What fascinated me was a different question: What would such an interrogation reveal if conducted as genuine philosophical dialogue?
That limitation became creative freedom. I was exploring the philosophical and psychological terrain these conversations could occupy—the ideas and moral frameworks these men held, dramatized through extended dialogue that never actually happened but perhaps reveals something true anyway.
Why Soviet interrogators instead of American or British? Simple: the Soviets got there first. They liberated camps like Majdanek months before Western forces reached others. And crucially, the Soviets had their own axe to grind—their own ideological framework, their own traumas, their own reasons to extract not just confessions but justifications.
This created the perfect dramatic collision: a Nazi officer defending order and necessity, interrogated by a Soviet officer operating within a different totalitarian system. Both men claiming moral authority. Both vulnerable to the same philosophical challenges they level at each other.
Refusing the Caricature
Here’s where my philosophy background became essential: I couldn’t write Henrik as a monster.
Not because monsters don’t exist—they do. But because most atrocities aren’t committed by cackling villains who know they’re evil. They’re committed by people who believe—genuinely, deeply believe—they’re doing something necessary. Something justified. Something that will, in the long run, protect what matters.
This is the uncomfortable truth that philosophers have grappled with for centuries: evil doesn’t usually announce itself as evil. It arrives dressed in the language of order, necessity, efficiency, protection. It speaks of difficult choices and unavoidable sacrifices. It sounds, disturbingly often, reasonable. In fact, this should sound entirely familiar to most people who hear most politicians talk.
My challenge became: Could I create a character who participated in terrible systems without making him a one-dimensional psychopath? Could I trace the logic—however twisted—that leads an ordinary person down a path they might never have imagined? Could I show how systems shape individuals, how ideology provides frameworks for tragedy?
Where Philosophy Meets Humanity
But philosophy alone wasn’t enough. These couldn’t be abstract voices debating principles in a vacuum.
Henrik and Yuri needed to be human—flawed, contradictory, carrying trauma, driven by psychological needs that often conflict with their stated principles.
The show is fundamentally philosophical in nature—exploring deep questions about responsibility, truth, and justice. But those philosophical arguments only become real when they’re grounded in human nature. When Henrik’s defense of “order” reveals something deeper about what he’s running from. When Yuri’s pursuit of “justice” exposes wounds that have never healed.
The dramatic elements—the escalating tension, the personal revelations, the moments of vulnerability—these aren’t decoration around the philosophy. They’re what make the philosophy matter. Ideas don’t exist in isolation. They’re shaped by fear, grief, anger, desperation. By what we need to believe about ourselves to keep functioning.
This is what makes the conversations feel real rather than academic: you’re not watching a debate. You’re watching two men whose entire sense of self depends on the arguments they’re making. Their worldviews aren’t intellectual positions they can casually discard—they are them.
The Philosophical Dialogue Series Tradition
What emerged was a philosophical dialogue series closer to ancient conversational traditions—not rigid academic debate, but organic exchanges where two minds grapple with fundamental questions and discover uncomfortable truths through sustained engagement.
“The Disclosure Room” follows this tradition, but grounds it in specific historical moments and the psychology of opposing characters. Henrik and Yuri aren’t philosopher-kings in an academy—they’re a Nazi officer and a Soviet interrogator in 1944, both carrying their own burdens, both armed with worldviews they believe are correct. Their conversation isn’t theoretical. It has stakes.
The format: two intelligent people, locked in extended dialogue, each forcing the other to examine premises they’d rather leave unquestioned.
Fiction Inspired by History
Henrik and Yuri are fictional characters. The specific events they discuss are dramatized and imagined, not documentary recreation. The characters, their backgrounds, and their conversations are products of my imagination—created specifically to explore complex ideas.
However, the types of arguments they make, the moral frameworks they deploy, the philosophical positions they defend—these are inspired by the historical record. Much of the key language invoked by the characters is historically accurate.
I’m not recreating actual interrogations or depicting real people. I’m exploring what the philosophical and psychological substance of such exchanges might have been—the deeper questions beneath the surface.
The Questions That Drive Every Episode
Each of the six episodes explores questions that have no easy answers:
Can participation in an evil system make you evil, even if you didn’t personally commit atrocities?
Where does responsibility lie when you’re following orders within a larger apparatus?
Is there objective truth, or just competing narratives with different amounts of power behind them?
When does adaptation to circumstances become moral compromise?
Can the pursuit of justice justify questionable methods?
These aren’t abstract puzzles. They’re questions these fictional characters must answer for themselves, in real time, with consequences that matter.
Why This Story Refuses Easy Answers
Here’s what surprised me as I wrote: the more I developed Henrik’s worldview, the more uncomfortable I became with how coherent it was.
Not correct—coherent. He’s not ranting about racial superiority or spouting propaganda. He’s making arguments about systems theory, resource allocation, and the requirements of order that sound disturbingly rational when stripped of their historical context.
This is what philosophy taught me: the scariest people aren’t the ones who reject reason, but the ones who use reason to advance terrible goals.
And Yuri? He starts seeking justice. But as their conversations deepen, he faces his own reckoning with difficult questions about ends and means. The psychological toll of what he’s pursuing begins to show cracks in his moral certainty.
The show doesn’t tell you who’s right. It shows you how both men justify what they do—and how their justifications reveal as much about their inner lives as about their moral reasoning. You wrestle with the implications.
The Format
Six 25-minute episodes of philosophical dialogue. Henrik on screen against a black background, responding to Yuri’s interrogation. The visual simplicity keeps focus entirely on the philosophical exchange.
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Beyond Season 1
“The Disclosure Room” is a philosophical dialogue series. While Season 1 examines Nazi-Soviet frameworks in 1944, the format isn’t bound to this setting. Future seasons will feature different characters, different eras, different ideological conflicts—but the same structure: extended dialogue that forces both participants to examine their deepest assumptions.
What I Hope You Take Away
“The Disclosure Room” isn’t entertainment that happens to touch on philosophical themes. This philosophical dialogue series presents philosophy as drama—difficult questions embodied in characters whose fates depend on how they answer them.
I’m not interested in giving you easy villains to hate or heroes to cheer. I’m interested in exploring how intelligent people end up on opposite sides, and how the philosophical frameworks we build often serve as shields against truths we can’t bear.
These questions about responsibility, truth, and justification remain urgent today. I don’t have the answers. But I think these conversations—uncomfortable, complex, genuinely philosophical, and deeply human—are worth having.
Ready to enter The Disclosure Room?