Nightshift – Kurzgesagt after Dark
Nightshift – Kurzgesagt after Dark
Witch Hunt SOURCES
We would like to thank
Prof. Alison Rowlands, professor of early modern European history at the University of Essex.
and
Dr. Jonathan Durant, historian of witch craft, formerly of the University of South Wales
for reviewing our script.
For our story, we relied on a wide set of sources–you will find links to them below and hope you check them out if you want to learn more about witches, witchcraft, and the witch hunts in Germany.
Of special interest are the books by our experts:
Jonathan Durrant’s Witchcraft, gender and society in early modern Germany (Brill, 2007)
https://www.jstor.org/content/oa_book_monograph/10.1163/j.ctt1w76wh1
and
Alison Rowlands’ Witchcraft narratives in Germany: Rothenburg, 1561-1652 (Manchester University Press, 2026)
Intro
A bucket of water slams into the unconscious woman’s face. She feels the strappado haul her up again by the wrists. A boot kicks her back, ankle weights yanking her down. Her spine snaps and she screams. Finally, she whispers: yes. To dancing with the devil, to blighting the crops.
The chief witch-hunter watches with greedy eyes. In such pain, truth no longer matters. Pressed for accomplices, she names neighbors, friends, family.
On the torture side of things, sometimes weights were added during strappado to achieve a higher level of pain and anguish.
#Robert Walinski-Kiel, Males, “masculine honor,” and Witch Hunting in Seventeenth-Century Germany, Men and Masculinities 6 (2004) pp. 254-271.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1097184X03257436
Here, Walinski-Kiel quotes the letter from Johannes Junius to his daughter Veronica.
#John Callow, Embracing the darkness: A cultural history of witchcraft (Bloomsbury, 2018) pg. 22.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/embracing-the-darkness-9781786732613/
By the end of 1631, hundreds in Bamberg will be killed, turning the German town into one of the deadliest places in Europe. The witch hunt frenzy will spare no one - not even the rich and powerful.
In personal communication, Alison Rowlands commented that while the executions took place in the cities, many of those who were executed came from the surrounding rural areas. As for Bamberg itself, what happened there was an extreme form of persecution–even by German standards.
Jonathan Durrant commented, on the other hand, that the witch hunts actually spared the clergy.
1 A Perfect Storm
Two hundred years earlier, magic is old news in Bamberg, a Catholic district in the Holy Roman Empire. Most people live scattered across the countryside, where every villaege has the cunning folk said to heal livestock or find lost objects.
#Michaela Hinterkörner, Die gesellschaftliche Oberschicht im Fokus der Hexenverfolgungen im Hochstift Bamberg: Der Fall der Familie Neudecker, Master’s Thesis at the University of Salzburg (2024) pg. 26.
https://eplus.uni-salzburg.at/obvusbhs/content/titleinfo/10168582
#Edward Bever, Popular witch beliefs and magical practices, in: The Oxford handbook of witchcraft in early modern Europe and Colonial America, Brian Levack (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 2013) pg. 53.
https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34335
#Oscar di Simplico, On the neuropsychological origins of witchcraft cognition:
The geographic and economic variable, in: The Oxford handbook of witchcraft in early modern Europe and Colonial America, Brian Levack (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 2013) pg. 514.
https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34335
#Ulrich Pfister, Urban population in Germany, 1500-1850, Center for Quantitative Economics, Paper 90 (2020).
https://www.wiwi.uni-muenster.de/cqe/sites/cqe/files/CQE_Paper/cqe_wp_90_2020.pdf
The Church mostly tolerates their harmless superstitions. But some, like Heinrich Kramer, claim witches are destroying Christianity. The misogynistic monk turned self-appointed inquisitor secures papal backing that witches are a real threat. He writes the Malleus Maleficarum, the “Witch Hammer”, a field guide on hunting them. He argues that women’s weaker nature and desire make them easy targets for the devil. The spicy descriptions of sabbaths, stealing and eating children in satanic banquets turn the book into a bestseller, second only to the Bible. So its ideas quickly harden into the belief that witchcraft is heresy.
Heinrich Kramer was actually a friar, but we wanted you to focus on the story instead of asking yourself: “what is a friar, again?” So we called him a monk. The main difference is that monks often stay in their monasteries while friars travel and engage more with the outside world.
#Richard Kieckhefer, Magic and its Hazards in the Late Medieval West, in: The Oxford handbook of witchcraft in early modern Europe and Colonial America, Brian Levack (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 2013) pg. 16.
https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34335
#Gerhild Scholz Williams, Demonologies, in: The Oxford handbook of witchcraft in early modern Europe and Colonial America, Brian Levack (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 2013) pg. 74.
https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34335
#Tamar Herzig, Fear and devotion in the writings of Heinrich Institoris, in: Emotions in the history of witchcraft, Laura Kounine & Michael Ostling (Eds.) pp. 19-20.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/978-1-137-52903-9
But by then, the Church faces a new threat: the Reformation. Claiming salvation is between believers and God, while the Church has been butting in like a greedy middleman. For protestants, the devil is the Pope himself. Soon, the empire fractures into Protestant and Catholic territories, promoting competing truths. The Catholic Church tightens its grip on a dwindling flock: confession is enforced and the ideal believer is both obedient and watchful.
In personal correspondence, Alison Rowlands reminds us that the Holy Roman Empire had always been divided into lots of autonomous territories. But the difference was that now, religious divisions were added to the mix.
#Jonathan Durrant, Witchcraft, gender and society in early modern Germany (Brill, 2007) pg. 12.
https://www.jstor.org/content/oa_book_monograph/10.1163/j.ctt1w76wh1
In 1618, the Thirty Years War erupts over which version of God is the right one. Marauding mercenaries kill far more than battles, turning to the countryside for their supplies. They strip villages bare and spread plague that finishes what hunger begins. For every soldier who dies in combat, ten peasants perish. On top of everything, Europe is gripped by the Little Ice Age. Harsh winters turn lethal, cutting weeks from the growing season. Crops fail just as war is already starving the population. So when a freak frost wipes out Bamberg’s fields in May 1626, the town of 10,000 looks for someone to blame.
#Robert Rapely, Witch hunts: From Salem to Guantanamo Bay (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007) pp. 8-9.
https://www.mqup.ca/Books/W/Witch-Hunts2
Peter Wilson, Europe’s tragedy: a history of the thirty years war (Allen Lane, 2009) pg 790.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/54022/europes-tragedy-by-wilson-peter-h/9780141006147
#Pascual Daudin, The Thirty Years’ War: The first modern war? Blog Post for Humanitarian Law & Policy, May 23, 2017.
https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2017/05/23/thirty-years-war-first-modern-war/
#Quentin Outram, The Socio-economic relations of warfare and the military mortality crises of the Thirty Years' War, Medical History 45 (2001) pp. 151-184.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300067703
#Scott Mandia, Blog Post on The Little Ice Age in Europe, Suffolk County Community College, 6 August 2025.
#Stephan Jackson, Britannica Article on The Little Ice Age, 4 April 2026.
https://www.britannica.com/science/Little-Ice-Age
#John Lanchester, How the little ice age changed history, The New Yorker, 25 March, 2019.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/01/how-the-little-ice-age-changed-history
#Jef Palframan, Frost witches: The spark of the Bamberg witch craze, Oglethorpe Journal of Undergraduate Research 2
The new prince-bishop, Johann Georg Fuchs von Dornheim, is a religious ruler and sheriff in one. When the crowds start speaking of witches, he needs no convincing. Fuchs establishes a professional witch-hunting commission of seven skilled lawyers. They become judge, jury and executioner. Among them is Dr. Ernst Vasoldt, soon the most feared witch-hunter.
#Michaela Hinterkörner, Die gesellschaftliche Oberschicht im Fokus der Hexenverfolgungen im Hochstift Bamberg: Der Fall der Familie Neudecker, Master’s Thesis at the University of Salzburg (2024) pp. 48, 91.
https://eplus.uni-salzburg.at/obvusbhs/content/titleinfo/10168582
The first arrests fall on the obvious targets: poor and marginalised women. Vasoldt always breaks them the same way. He begins with interrogation: about sabbaths, Devil's pact, who else was there. If the words don’t come, he lays out thumbscrews, legscrews, burning iron claws, and his favourite: the strappado. He describes them one by one, pressing some against the skin.
#Michaela Hinterkörner, Die gesellschaftliche Oberschicht im Fokus der Hexenverfolgungen im Hochstift Bamberg: Der Fall der Familie Neudecker, Master’s Thesis at the University of Salzburg (2024) pg. 26.
https://eplus.uni-salzburg.at/obvusbhs/content/titleinfo/10168582
#Thomas Robisheaux, The German witch trials, in: The Oxford handbook of witchcraft in early modern Europe and Colonial America, Brian Levack (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 2013) pg. 187.
https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34335
#Robert Walinski-Kiel, Males, “masculine honor,” and Witch Hunting in Seventeenth-Century Germany, Men and Masculinities 6 (2004) pp. 254-271.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1097184X03257436
Here, again, Walinski-Kiel quotes the letter from Johannes Junius to his daughter Veronica.
Giving names might buy hours of relief but Vasoldt wants hundreds. As familiar names run out, the tortured begin to accuse the town’s richest and most powerful. In April 1627, the mayor’s wife is named. And all hell breaks loose.
#Robert Rapely, Witch hunts: From Salem to Guantanamo Bay (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007) pg. 14.
https://www.mqup.ca/Books/W/Witch-Hunts2
#Michaela Hinterkörner, Die gesellschaftliche Oberschicht im Fokus der Hexenverfolgungen im Hochstift Bamberg: Der Fall der Familie Neudecker, Master’s Thesis at the University of Salzburg (2024) pp. 26, 44.
https://eplus.uni-salzburg.at/obvusbhs/content/titleinfo/10168582
#Robert Walinski-Kiel, Males, “masculine honor,” and Witch Hunting in Seventeenth-Century Germany, Men and Masculinities 6 (2004) pp. 254-271.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1097184X03257436
#Britta Gehm, Die Hexenverfolgung im Hochstift Bamberg und das Eingreifen des Reichshofrates zu ihrer Beendigung (Georg Olms Verlag, 2013) pg. 126-138.
2 The Witch Factory
In the quiet of dawn, Vasoldt walks down the merchant quarter. At the mayor’s house, his wife Christina opens. She can’t believe Vasoldt came for her. People like her don’t get arrested. That is the whole point of being people like her! Her sons watch from the doorway as their mother is dragged out.
Inside the house, estate administrators throw open cupboards and trunks, recording each item. The silver candlesticks. The jewelry and coins. The value of the house itself. The inventory book goes to the commission that takes one-fifth of the estate if the condemned has children. Half if they’re childless. Everything if there are no heirs. One third of proceeds goes directly to the judges and executioners.
#Michaela Hinterkörner, Die gesellschaftliche Oberschicht im Fokus der Hexenverfolgungen im Hochstift Bamberg: Der Fall der Familie Neudecker, Master’s Thesis at the University of Salzburg (2024) pp. 43-44, 51.
https://eplus.uni-salzburg.at/obvusbhs/content/titleinfo/10168582
#John Callow, Embracing the darkness: A cultural history of witchcraft (Bloomsbury, 2018) pg. 32.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/embracing-the-darkness-9781786732613/
And Bamberg’s richest families are worth tens of million dollars in today’s money. An opportunity too good to miss, especially as the town drowns in war debt. The model proves brutally effective with wealth seized from the rich funding more trials. Witch-hunting becomes Fuchs’ fiscal policy. His zeal echoes beyond Bamberg and he hires out Vasoldt for a fee to assist other districts.
#Robert Walinski-Kiel, Males, “masculine honor,” and Witch Hunting in Seventeenth-Century Germany, Men and Masculinities 6 (2004) pp. 254-271.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1097184X03257436
According to Walinski-Kiel, Burgomaster Neudecker was worth at least 100,000 guilders. An unskilled laborer at the time would have earned about 300 guilders per year. If that is compared to a laborer in the United States today, making about $36,000 (according to ZipRecruiter), then that 100,000 guilders had the buying power of about $12 Million.
#Michaela Hinterkörner, Die gesellschaftliche Oberschicht im Fokus der Hexenverfolgungen im Hochstift Bamberg: Der Fall der Familie Neudecker, Master’s Thesis at the University of Salzburg (2024) pp. 37, 51.
https://eplus.uni-salzburg.at/obvusbhs/content/titleinfo/10168582
#John Callow, Embracing the darkness: A cultural history of witchcraft (Bloomsbury, 2018) pg. 23.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/embracing-the-darkness-9781786732613/
#Erik Midelfort, Witch hunting in southwestern Germany 1562-1684: The social and intellectual foundations (Stanford University Press, 1972) pg 145.
https://www.sup.org/books/history/witch-hunting-southwestern-germany-1562-1684
By summer, Bamberg’s prisons are bursting and Fuchs orders a two-story building raised against the city walls: the Witch House. Inside, twenty-six narrow cells line two long corridors, with two larger cells for groups. The guards’ rooms are warmed by tiled stoves but prisoners like the mayor’s wife Christina shiver on cold stones. It’s a machine built to extract confessions, setting off a chain reaction that manufactures more witches to feed itself.
#Michaela Hinterkörner, Die gesellschaftliche Oberschicht im Fokus der Hexenverfolgungen im Hochstift Bamberg: Der Fall der Familie Neudecker, Master’s Thesis at the University of Salzburg (2024) pp. 38, 46, 49.
https://eplus.uni-salzburg.at/obvusbhs/content/titleinfo/10168582
#John Callow, Embracing the darkness: A cultural history of witchcraft (Bloomsbury, 2018) pg. 22.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/embracing-the-darkness-9781786732613/
After confessing, the accused are burned and sometimes beheaded in a public spectacle. Each week, three to six witches are executed together for cost-efficiency and effect. Katharina Haan watches in horror as her neighbor and friend Christina is swallowed by the flames. The stench of burning hair and searing flesh bites at her nostrils. The screams echo in her head for weeks.
#Lyndal Roper, Witch craze: Terror and fantasy in Baroque Germany (Yale University Press, 2006) pg. 65.
Every morning Vasoldt’s men drag a new neighbour from their house and the ledger men have become more terrible than tax collectors. Katharina urges her husband: you have power here, do something! He is Dr. Georg Haan, Chancellor of Bamberg and the senior legal administrator. He too is in the witch-hunting commission, though privately troubled by its brutality. There are laws, and they demand evidence before torture. Confessions must be given freely, property can’t be seized at will, and the accused have a right to appeal. Fuchs and Vasoldt follow none of that. But the Holy Roman Empire is a sprawling patchwork and the emperor in Vienna has bigger concerns than one bishop’s prisoners.
#Robert Walinski-Kiel, Males, “masculine honor,” and Witch Hunting in Seventeenth-Century Germany, Men and Masculinities 6 (2004) pp. 254-271.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1097184X03257436
#Jonathan Durrant, Witchcraft, gender and society in early modern Germany (Brill, 2007) pg. 4.
https://www.jstor.org/content/oa_book_monograph/10.1163/j.ctt1w76wh1
#Lyndal Roper, Witch craze: Terror and fantasy in Baroque Germany (Yale University Press, 2006) pg. 46.
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300119831/witch-craze/
#Thomas Robisheaux, The German witch trials, in: The Oxford handbook of witchcraft in early modern Europe and Colonial America, Brian Levack (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 2013) pg. 193.
Haan shows quiet mercy for his cases and voices doubts in council chambers. But now his wife wants him to do something bolder. So he begins accepting petitions from the victims’ families. It is a high-risk move. Powerful men who obstruct prosecutions are considered witches themselves.
In December 1627, while Haan is away on business with his son, his wife Katharina and their daughter are taken to the Witch House. Under torture, Katharina accuses her husband and their son. By the time Haan returns, his wife and daughter are dead, burned to ash. And waiting at his house, stands Vasoldt.
Haan had gone to the Reichskammergericht (Imperial Chamber Court) in Speyer to complain about how Fuchs von Dornheim had conducted the witch investigations in Bamberg.
#John Callow, Embracing the darkness: A cultural history of witchcraft (Bloomsbury, 2018) pp. 23-24.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/embracing-the-darkness-9781786732613/
#Michaela Hinterkörner, Die gesellschaftliche Oberschicht im Fokus der Hexenverfolgungen im Hochstift Bamberg: Der Fall der Familie Neudecker, Master’s Thesis at the University of Salzburg (2024) pp. 91-92.
https://eplus.uni-salzburg.at/obvusbhs/content/titleinfo/10168582
#Robert Walinski-Kiel, Males, “masculine honor,” and Witch Hunting in Seventeenth-Century Germany, Men and Masculinities 6 (2004) pp. 254-271.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1097184X03257436
#Robert Rapely, Witch hunts: From Salem to Guantanamo Bay (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007) pg. 15.
3 Dead on Arrival
Georg Haan, once Bamberg’s Chancellor, a man who could halt trials with his signature, is stripped of office and taken to the Witch House with his son. Haan urges him to confess at once, but it doesn’t save him. With his entire family dead, Haan has no reason left to stay strong. This surrender is exactly what Vasoldt needs as he drags him to the torture chamber. Haan is going to help him take down another once-powerful man. Kneeling on the floor is Johannes Junius, former head of the city council and Haan’s colleague.
#John Callow, Embracing the darkness: A cultural history of witchcraft (Bloomsbury, 2018) pp. 24-27.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/embracing-the-darkness-9781786732613/
He keeps insisting he is innocent but Haan answers coldly. He claims he saw him at a witch gathering in the council chamber. When Junius denies it, Vasoldt orders him to strip. His naked body is searched for the Devil’s mark. A clover-shaped spot on his side is enough. They start tightening their screws and the strappado. Five days later, he breaks down.
#Robert Rapely, Witch hunts: From Salem to Guantanamo Bay (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007) pg. 16.
https://www.mqup.ca/Books/W/Witch-Hunts2
#Robert Walinski-Kiel, Males, “masculine honor,” and Witch Hunting in Seventeenth-Century Germany, Men and Masculinities 6 (2004) pp. 254-271.
Just before his execution, Junius bribes a jailer to smuggle out a letter to his daughter. His confession is all lies. All six who denounced him said they were forced. He writes: "For whoever comes into the witch prison must become a witch or be tortured until he invents something out of his head."
We took some liberties here. Junius was arrested, in part, because Haan named him as an accomplice. The scene describes the confrontation at the beginning of an interrogation between a condemned witch and a new suspect the witch had named. It was a one time act. Junius hears of Haan’s accusation and refutes it. But there is no coldness in what Haan does and Junius actually writes in his letter to Veronica–which is intercepted–that Haan is to be forgiven because he had no choice but to do what he did.
#Robert Rapely, Witch hunts: From Salem to Guantanamo Bay (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007) pp. 18-20.
https://www.mqup.ca/Books/W/Witch-Hunts2
#Robert Walinski-Kiel, Males, “masculine honor,” and Witch Hunting in Seventeenth-Century Germany, Men and Masculinities 6 (2004) pp. 254-271.
By the end of 1628, around 80 people, the entire ruling city council of Bamberg, along with their wives and children, are executed. Still, the Witch House remains full. The execution ground beyond the walls works without pause and the city keeps consuming itself. But the screaming eventually reaches beyond Bamberg‘s walls.
In personal communication, Alison Rowlands notes that the Bamberg witch-trials had a gender split of affecting 26% men and 74% women. Men of high political and social status were targeted as were, historians think, witch hunt opponents like Haan. That is, the trials were weaponised as a tool of political factionalism.
From the sources we read, our best guess is that around 60 people were executed in total.
4 A Race Against Time
A horse pounds through the night. Bamberg’s councilman Flock rides hard, torch snapping in the wind. He can’t believe this is happening again. Two years ago the witch-hunters arrested and killed his first wife. Then came Dorothea, and now they took her too, heavily pregnant. By dawn he reaches Nuremberg and hammers on the door of Dorothea’s family. They have ties to patricians with direct lines to the emperor. Maybe they can help.
Their letter arrives at the imperial palace in Vienna, where similar appeals have been piling up. Emperor Ferdinand reads about the burning of the Haan family and now, the pregnant wife of another councilman has been taken prisoner. In April 1630, he demands Fuchs to explain himself and release Dorothea. The prince-bishop replies that he is just serving God.
#Michaela Hinterkörner, Die gesellschaftliche Oberschicht im Fokus der Hexenverfolgungen im Hochstift Bamberg: Der Fall der Familie Neudecker, Master’s Thesis at the University of Salzburg (2024) pp. 90-93.
https://eplus.uni-salzburg.at/obvusbhs/content/titleinfo/10168582
#John Callow, Embracing the darkness: A cultural history of witchcraft (Bloomsbury, 2018) pg. 32.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/embracing-the-darkness-9781786732613/
Desperate, Flock threatens to appeal to the Pope. So in May, the emperor sends a second command: stop proceedings against Dorothea Flock! But when his messenger arrives, Vasoldt’s executors have already dragged her from her newborn child and beheaded her. Dorothea’s bereaved family begins to organize a resistance. They gather testimonies from victims’ families and escaped prisoners to bring before the Emperor.
#Michaela Hinterkörner, Die gesellschaftliche Oberschicht im Fokus der Hexenverfolgungen im Hochstift Bamberg: Der Fall der Familie Neudecker, Master’s Thesis at the University of Salzburg (2024) pp. 90-91.
https://eplus.uni-salzburg.at/obvusbhs/content/titleinfo/10168582
#John Callow, Embracing the darkness: A cultural history of witchcraft (Bloomsbury, 2018) pg. 32.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/embracing-the-darkness-9781786732613/
The timing is right: when the Swedish army invades from the north, Emperor Ferdinand needs unity and order but the maverick inquisitors in Bamberg have become a liability. At the imperial assembly, the victims’ accusations are read and two survivors of the Witch House make their case. Ferdinand accuses Fuchs of illegal trials, of torture without cause and of contempt for both imperial and papal authority. He orders an investigation, requiring trial documents to be handed over and halts all arrests. Fuchs panics. He orders burning the original trial records and forge new ones that appear lawful. But still - he doesn’t stop the trials.
#Jonathan Durrant, Witchcraft, gender and society in early modern Germany (Brill, 2007) pg. 12.
https://www.jstor.org/content/oa_book_monograph/10.1163/j.ctt1w76wh1
#Michaela Hinterkörner, Die gesellschaftliche Oberschicht im Fokus der Hexenverfolgungen im Hochstift Bamberg: Der Fall der Familie Neudecker, Master’s Thesis at the University of Salzburg (2024) pp. 93-95.
https://eplus.uni-salzburg.at/obvusbhs/content/titleinfo/10168582
It has not been proven that Fuchs von Dornheim ordered the original trial records to be burned. But Britta Gehm writes that it is a possibility that he wanted to hide his tracks.
#Britta Gehm, Die Hexenverfolgung im Hochstift Bamberg und das Eingreifen des Reichshofrates zu ihrer Beendigung (Georg Olms Verlag, 2013) pg. 253.
In June 1631, Emperor Ferdinand decrees that the Carolina Code, the first German criminal code, applies without exception across the Empire. No secret trials, no unlimited torture, no seizure of property. The system that made Bamberg’s witch hunt possible and profitable, is finally dismantled. By winter 1631, the Swedish army is closing in and Fuchs flees to Austria. His men release the last ten prisoners from the Witch House, forcing them to swear silence, then scatter, taking whatever they can carry. Johann Georg Fuchs, now known as the Witch Bishop, dies the following year. He is never brought to trial for the execution of more than 600 innocent people.
#Michaela Hinterkörner, Die gesellschaftliche Oberschicht im Fokus der Hexenverfolgungen im Hochstift Bamberg: Der Fall der Familie Neudecker, Master’s Thesis at the University of Salzburg (2024) pp. 38, 49, 96.
https://eplus.uni-salzburg.at/obvusbhs/content/titleinfo/10168582
#John Callow, Embracing the darkness: A cultural history of witchcraft (Bloomsbury, 2018) pg. 32.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/embracing-the-darkness-9781786732613/
5 The Long Shadow
Witch trials continued across the Holy Roman Empire into the 18th century as witchcraft was gradually decriminalised. Between 1400 and 1750, around 100,000 people were prosecuted in Europe. Roughly half were executed, mostly women. About 25,000 killings took place within the German territories. The cause was structural. Fragmented rule left no central court to halt mass panics and local rulers acted without oversight. Unless the trials were shut down by higher authorities or disrupted by the chaos of the Thirty Years War, they could run on for years.
#Michaela Hinterkörner, Die gesellschaftliche Oberschicht im Fokus der Hexenverfolgungen im Hochstift Bamberg: Der Fall der Familie Neudecker, Master’s Thesis at the University of Salzburg (2024) pg. 89.
https://eplus.uni-salzburg.at/obvusbhs/content/titleinfo/10168582
#Brian Levack, The Oxford handbook of witchcraft in early modern Europe and Colonial America, (Oxford University Press, 2013) pg. 5-6.
https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34335
#Lyndal Roper, Witch craze: Terror and fantasy in Baroque Germany (Yale University Press, 2006) pg. 6-7.
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300119831/witch-craze/
#Jonathan Durrant, Witchcraft, gender and society in early modern Germany (Brill, 2007) pg. 245.
https://www.jstor.org/content/oa_book_monograph/10.1163/j.ctt1w76wh1
#Thomas Robisheaux, The German witch trials, in: The Oxford handbook of witchcraft in early modern Europe and Colonial America, Brian Levack (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 2013) pg. 179.
But witch-hunting never fully ended. People accused of witchcraft are still killed in certain rural regions of sub-Saharan Africa, India and Papua New Guinea, where legal protection has limited reach. The modern death toll likely dwarfs that of early modern Europe. In Tanzania alone, 20,000 people lost lives to witch-hunt violence in just two decades. The accused are still mostly women and the elderly. Scapegoats for illnesses and misfortunes, especially in times of economic hardship. The pattern remains unchanged: a community’s fear turned inward, settling on whoever is easiest to blame.
#Wikipedia Article on Modern Witch Hunts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_witch_hunts
Charlotte Müller, Witch hunts: A global problem in the 21st century, Deutsche Welle, 8 October, 2020.
https://www.dw.com/en/witch-hunts-a-global-problem-in-the-21st-century/a-54495289
If you search online for “modern witch hunts” and include, for example, “Sub-Saharan Africa” or “Papua New Guinea,” you will find more sources.