While work on the film was nearing completion in December 1965, the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany convened for its 11th Plenum, held between the 16th and the 18th, which would become "a grand Auto-da-fé" for the field of culture. In his speech on the first day, Member of the Politburo and Central Committee Secretary for Security Matters Erich Honecker stated: "few of the films produced by DEFA in recent months... "The Rabbit Is Me" and "Just Don't Think I'll Cry"... reflect tendencies which are alien and damaging to socialism... In the name of an 'abstract truth', those artists concentrate on presenting flaws in the GDR... They do not understand they hamper the development of a socialist consciousness among the working class." Many other functionaries echoed Honecker's line and blamed the country's cinema, television and theater for fostering a "pessimistic and skeptic" attitude. In the aftermath of the plenum, many prominent figures in the field of culture were dismissed, including Minister of Culture Hans Bentzien and DEFA's director-general Mückenberger. "The Rabbit Is Me" and Frank Beyer's "Trace of Stones" were banned, and ten other pictures followed; they would either be removed from circulation or remain unfinished. Among those was also "Hands Up or I'll Shoot". Studio officials inspected the film's rough cut on 28 February. Ralf Schenk wrote that after the meeting, "in a hysterical atmosphere, in which none knew what was wrong and what right, and what next would be considered an offence by the authorities", Kasprzik and Strahl compiled a list of twenty-two sequences to be removed or corrected. For example, they wrote: "the following sentence is unacceptable: 'when he met her, all thoughts about his fantasies or about dialectical materialism abandoned his mind'." and in another place, "When seeing the closed pawn office, the man will not say: 'planned economy!' but rather 'well, so it happens'." They also cut the second half of the sentence "no monument remains forever, new ones are built", spoken by one of the thieves, as they feared it would be interpreted as an allusion to the removal of Stalin's statues during De-Stalinization. The DEFA directorate approved the picture on 14 April 1966. As Schenk noted, the studio still considered the picture's theme a positive and acceptable one, and did not believe it would encounter difficulties.