Politics & Power Quote by Klaus Fuchs

A chilling banality sits at the center of Fuchs's line: the world-historical choice framed as a social itch. "Because I felt I had to" turns ideology into compulsion, as if politics were less conviction than oxygen. Then comes the real tell: "some organization". Not the Communist Party as a program, a theory of history, or a moral crusade, but as a container for belonging. The phrasing shrinks a totalizing political commitment into an administrative detail, the kind of justification you might give for joining a club.

That rhetorical minimization is doing work. Fuchs, a German-born physicist who fled Nazism and later passed atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, is often read through the melodrama of espionage. Here he offers something colder: the suggestion that the path to catastrophe can be paved by unmet needs for structure and community. The subtext is less "I believed" than "I needed an identity that came with a membership card". It’s a portrait of the technocrat as political orphan, someone for whom affiliation substitutes for worldview.

Context sharpens the edge. Interwar Europe and the early Cold War produced immense pressures to pick a side, especially for refugees and intellectuals who watched liberal institutions fail in real time. For many anti-fascists, communism was not abstract; it was the organized answer that showed up. Fuchs’s sentence captures that era’s psychological economy: when history demands certainty, "some organization" can feel like shelter. It can also become an alibi, a way to narrate agency as inevitability, smoothing over the moral weight of what came next.