Karl Wilhelm Fricke is well known in Germany as a broadcaster and journalist, and as a phenomenon: ‘the case of Fricke.’ He has always been an agitator against the German Democratic Republic. On April Fools’ Day 1955, at a meeting in West Berlin, Stasi agents drugged his cognac and then shunted him, unconscious, over the sector border. He was convicted of ‘war and boycott instigation against the GDR’ and sentenced to four years in solitary confinement, which he served until the last day. There was nothing the west could do to get him out.
