Karl Wilhelm Fricke (born 3 September 1929) is a German political journalist and author.
He has produced several of the standard works on resistance and state repression in the German Democratic Republic (1949–1990).
In 1955 he became one of several hundred kidnap victims of the East German Ministry for State Security, captured in West Berlin and taken to the east where for nearly five years he was held in state detention.From 1970 till 1994 he worked for (West) Germany's national radio station where he was influential as a political commentator and as the broadcaster's editor for "East-West affairs".