On 5 April 1957 officers of the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) arrested Schmutzler in Leipzig, at his apartment in the Alfred Kästner Street After less than eight months of investigative detention he faced trial: he was found guilty of "incitement to boycott" ("Boykotthetze") and was sentenced to a further five years imprisonment. In the event he was released on 18 February 1961, having spent the intervening period in the prison at Torgau. The trial was recorded by the authorities and given wide publicity, which was a feature of East German show trials during the 1950s. A couple of weeks after the trial's conclusion, extracts from the judge's questioning of Schmutzler appeared in Der Spiegel, West Germany's widely respected (and widely read) news magazine. As Spiegel freely admitted, its record of the trial transcript was selective, and highlighted only the most "loaded" moments of the interrogation conducted on behalf of the East German Communist authorities. The transcript publication nevertheless gave to many of those who might have preferred not to know of the matter, a timely insight into the contemporary show-trial culture operating across the internal political (and subsequently physical) frontier that since 1949 had divided the two Germanys.