twenty years for spreading rumors prejudicial

The Rhineland Campaign, 1945 The Hard Winter
The civilians' feeling of relief at being out of the war was beginning to give way under the hardships of the winter to a subdued resentment.
But the resentment was not at a level approaching resistance to the occupation. Of 487 cases tried in Ninth Army military government courts up to the end of January, three-quarters were for minor circulation and curfew violations. In the two most serious cases, one defendant got twenty years for spreading rumors prejudicial to Allied interests and the other got fifteen years and a 10,000 Reichsmark fine for disobedience to military government orders. The other cases were sometimes interesting but hardly evidence of a threat to military security. Even harboring German soldiers, a serious crime, usually turned out not to have been motivated by malice. In one instance a mother wanted to keep her son at home ; in another a homeowner needed someone to fix his house and the soldier was handy with tools ; and in a third a soldier turned himself in after a lovers' quarrel with the woman with whom he was living. He went to a prisoner of war camp, she to jail for fifteen months. In Schaffenberg, outside Aachen, a man was sentenced for holding a public meeting. He had hired a carpenter to repair his house and a crowd had gathered to watch the carpenter work. In Brand a summary military government court fined a civilian 100 marks for calling the Buergermeister a thief and a Nazi. The review board reversed the sentence on the ground that civilians should be encouraged to comment on public officials.