[2] Bader and his wife Sabina were baptized by Jakob Gross in the winter of 1526/27 and joined the Augsburg Anabaptist community.
After this wave of arrests, most leaders of the Augsburg Anabaptists were taken prisoner or banished from the city, so Bader was appointed head of the community at the suggestion of Leonhard Freisleben.
From spring of 1528 he also held large, open-air meetings outside the city to prepare the Anabaptists for the Last Judgment predicted by Hans Hut to occur at Pentecost 1528.
Through Eitelhans Langenmantel, Bader had obtained a copy of Hut's "Mission Booklet" and was thus informed about his apocalyptic teachings and calculation of the end times.
In Strasbourg he met the German Peasants' War preacher Oswald Leber, who, based on the Jewish messianic revelation of Abraham ben Eliezer Halevi, predicted the year 1530 as the date for the return of the Messiah.
In July and August, Bader experienced three visions in his hiding place, upon which he based his own doctrine of the "great change" that he believed would occur at Easter 1530.
Towards the end of 1528, Bader left Augsburg again and appeared at various Anabaptist meetings, where he spread his visions and tried to find followers for the movement he founded.
Via Esslingen am Neckar he went to a meeting on the Schönberg river, near Geroldseck Castle in modern-day Hohengeroldseck in order to reveal himself as a prophet to a group of confidants.
By 1529, Bader, with his wife, three children and a small group of followers had established a commune in the hamlet of Lautern in the Duchy of Württemberg.
[4] There, they continued to evolve their theology, fueled by dreams, visions, and reflections on intellectual currents from late medieval and early modern Germany.
Some of their views aligned with demands for social justice, which were characteristic of populist preaching during the early Protestant Reformation.
The preparations also included contacting Jews from Leipheim and Günzburg in order to have them confirm the end times based on kabbalah.
Bader interpreted Vischer's dream as a prediction for his future role as king in the thousand-year kingdom and for the royal lineage of his recently born youngest son.
[5] Based on the trial files, the arrests, interrogations with torture and executions of the Bader's millenarian group can be reconstructed quite well.
In the run-up to the Diet of Augsburg, Bader was portrayed as an agent of the expelled Duke Ulrich of Württemberg.