Do we like them?

Do we like Fritz Hilpert?

Our score: 5 out of 10. Nothing harmful or dodgy turned up, but he gives almost no interviews and there is too little on the public record to score higher.

Fritz Hilpert is the percussion and sound-engineering half of the Kraftwerk machine that most people never name. A review of the band's 2025 North American tour says he handled the electronic percussion from about 1990. That makes him one of the long-serving hands behind the robot-pop sound.

The catch is that he is not on the road with them now. The same review says he wasn't touring with the band in 2025, which set off fan speculation that he had left. Kraftwerk has not, in anything we found, officially said whether he is in or out.

The 2025 touring lineup was Ralf Hütter with Henning Schmitz, Falk Grieffenhagen and Georg Bongartz, according to coverage of the shows. Kraftwerk then announced a European leg for later in 2025. So the band has kept going without him on stage.

On the harm check, we found nothing: no campaigning against LGBTQ+ people, no conspiracy-theory slide, no culture-war grifting and no dodgy collaborators. We could not complete every search we planned, and he rarely speaks publicly. Silence from a man who lets the music talk is not the same as a clean bill of health, but it is not a red flag either.

On how he treats people, no lawsuits, allegations or court outcomes in his name came up. The legal fights we did see involved the band's trademark and a famous sampling case, not him personally. That is honestly the whole list, which is why the score sits mid-table rather than higher.