His employer in Oregon, Thomas Rogers, was a Christadelphian who, seeing Maier distributing atheistic literature signed ‘a seeker after Truth’, invited him to his home.
[2] Maier returned to Obertürkheim in Stuttgart in the mid-1890s with the intention of preaching there, but found little interest so sold his house and prepared with his mother to emigrate permanently.
He left two converts: 27-year-old Friedrich Weber (30 April 1899) and, in Schmalkalden near Kassel, Henriette Britzius, who with her husband emigrated to Birmingham, England and remained a bridge between British and German Christadelphians into her old age.
Gerdtell was originally with the Baptists, and for a time would be with the Christadelphians, though following his outspoken engagement in politics - and the reporting of a statement made in a local grocer's shop in 1934 that "Hitler is synonymous with war",[4] he had to flee via Spain to America.
Although the Christadelphians were suspect for their pacifism, and pro-Jewish interpretations of prophecy, Maier maintained a "strangers and pilgrims" attitude to Germany's politics, with the result that most of the Christadelphians avoided arrest until war broke out and conscription was introduced; several were imprisoned and Albert Merz was executed in April 1941.