In mid-May 1854, Maria Scherrer from Ockershausen filed charges against a certain Anton Zimmermann, a twenty-two-year-old day laborer from the neighboring village. He was accused of having stolen bread and a cap from her thirteen-year-old son and his nine-year-old friend. The bread had been obtained by begging and was valued at six or seven silver pennies.

At about ten o'clock in the morning of the same day in Ockershausen, the two boys had set out – according to the statement of Engelberg's mother – “to come up with some bread.” As had usually been the case before, they were quite successful; they received bread from a total of twenty-three residents in the surrounding villages of Cyriaxweimar, Haddamshausen, Hermershausen, Weiershausen, and Allna. When they were on the way home again (they had obtained about two loaves of bread by begging), they met Anton Zimmermann not far from their home village. He warned them, as they were after all guilty of begging, which was not allowed, that they should be on the lookout because he had seen policemen. What is more, he did not leave it at that but demanded that they give him the remaining one-and one-half loaves of bread. When they did not do so – according to the statement of Heinrich Scherrer – “Zimmermann grabbed me, threw me to the ground on my back, and took the bundle of bread … away … from me … with one hand, then smacked me a couple times with his crop.” He also “boxed” Engelberg's “ears” and snatched the bread.

Barely four days later, the junior state procurator in Marburg, Meibom, had Anton Zimmermann arrested. In September of the same year, the state authorities sentenced Zimmermann in the Marburg Schwurgericht to a five-year sentence of imprisonment with an eight-pound chain on his right foot.

The theft was an ordinary one, as occurred daily by the hundreds, even thousands, in the nineteenth century – theft was by far the most common crime. Yet despite the minimal value of the stolen goods, the little significance of the persons involved, and the almost banal – at least at first glance – motives (if it seems simply to have been a matter of hunger), the offender was prosecuted for months at great expense, and his case documented with hundreds of pages.