He also carries a first Mass in German rather than Latin, and preaches his flock to destroy all the saints' icons in the local chapel, which he deems to be heretical.

He flees to southern Germany, where he and his friend Heinrich Pfeiffer take over the city of Muehlhausen and form a peasant rebel army, intending to liberate the people.

The Der Spiegel film critic wrote that the picture was "intended to depict the 16th-Century Iconoclast as Walter Ulbricht's ideological predecessor" and that its plot culminated in "a complete confusion.

"[4] West Germany's Catholic Film Service described it as "an immense production... with a superficial and biased interpretation of history... in spite of the expensive crowd scenes, it is anemic.

In a special 13-minutes-long supplement to the new edition, historian Susanne Galley noted several inaccuracies in the plot: Muentzer is shown to have held to his beliefs under torture, while in reality he agreed to deny them before his execution; the peasants' defeat in the Battle of Frankenhausen is attributed to betrayal and sabotage, rather than to the weakness of their army.