01x02 - Germany: The Witch Hunts Begin

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♪

The Salem witch trials remain

the most notorious in history,

but more than a century

before New England

tore itself apart, a panic

gripped the Western world,

and the era of the

witch hunt began.

- People believe in

God, but that means they

believe in the devil

too, so they're on the

lookout for witchcraft.

♪

Over two centuries, nearly

60,000 people, mostly

women, were put to death

for the crime of witchcraft

in a series of hunts and

trials that spread across

Europe and the Americas.

- And suddenly you're

on trial for your life.

That's a terrifying thing.

Neighbor turned against neighbor

in a desperate attempt to

root out malevolent witches.

Those found guilty were

hanged, beheaded, or burnt.

- We cannot underestimate

the impression

this must have left on

people seeing a person being

burned to death.

These are the true

stories of the people

pursued and ex*cuted as witches,

and the men who made it

their mission to hunt them down.

♪

- The idea of a

witch is prehistoric.

It's there right at

the beginning of

recorded human time.

- In ancient times, a

witch was somebody

who did harm in a

community by magical means.

They might do it through

all sorts of different routes,

do with herbs or stones, or

anything that you might find

in the natural environment.

But you wouldn't

necessarily put them on trial.

You might think that person

who you thought was a witch

was also an asset

to your community

because they could

also do good magic.

They could heal people.

They could change the weather.

Magic could be good and

bad, and it was a very flexible

force in the ancient world.

As the 13th and

14th centuries pass,

perceptions shift, and the

world becomes dangerous

for anyone

identified as a witch.

The Middle Ages isn't

an easy time to be alive.

There is widespread

w*r across Europe,

much of which is religious

w*r between Catholics,

Protestants, and

other emerging sects.

There are also a whole

range of other dangers,

wide-scale epidemics,

particularly the bubonic plague,

which kills people in very

large numbers indeed.

- People are so desperate

for advice and help,

where sickness is scarily

common in comparison with

the modern world,

in which your children

and your elderly relatives

are both very likely prey

to infectious diseases,

the origins of which you

don't understand at all.

The witch is an ideal scapegoat

for a lot of these different

challenges that people face.

- And so the

belief in witchcraft

was just offering

an explanation,

and not only an explanation,

it was also offering suspects

and people who were

thought to be guilty of it.

So you could give these

catastrophes a face.

You could say, "This

woman or this man is doing it."

The surge to accuse

is driven by ordinary

people who really do

believe that the suspects

have ruined their lives, k*lled

their children and livestock,

set their houses on fire,

destroyed their crops.

And people with no

knowledge of meteorology,

no knowledge of biology,

no knowledge of pathology,

no way of explaining

disease, no way of explaining

bad weather,

witchcraft becomes a

rational explanation

for all sorts of things.

- The end of the 15th century,

you start to get a sense of

witchcraft in European

society growing out of the

fear of heresy.

- A heretic is someone

who is defined

by the church authorities

as not following the rules,

the regulations, the beliefs

of Christian orthodoxy.

Because in this period of

the 15th to 18th centuries,

we're really dealing with

nations which are theocracies,

they're really godly states.

People aren't comfortable

embracing these

different divergent views.

There can only be one right one.

The church decides

that witches and

heretics are very

much like each other.

All of the things that people

have been thinking about

before, magic of various

good kinds, medicinal magic,

manipulating the weather,

get swept up into this new

definition of what a witch is.

The witch becomes somebody

who not only does harm

in your community,

but does it by the

help of the devil.

They might agree a pact

with the devil to do that,

they would be given

power in exchange

for handing over their

body and soul to the devil,

in exchange for

worshiping the devil.

And it became more

and more likely too

that witches would be women.

Underlying the

concept of witchcraft in

all countries was the idea that

women were the weaker vessels,

the Bible taught.

Women might be more

susceptible to the devil's temptation.

Cause I think that's

always hardwired

to every witchcraft accusation.

And that's why

one finds that 80%

of accused witches are women.

The Catholic church

decides that actually,

there really are witches,

and it's the church's

job to root them out.

When you get a

combination of intense

religious temptation, warfare,

persecution, bad weather,

and a new idea of a satanic

crusade using witches,

that's the perfect

storm you're looking for

to create intense witch hunts.

During the mid 15th

century, there were

sporadic witch trials,

and lots of people started

writing demonologies.

A demonologist is an expert

in the way that demons work.

After 1400 in

Europe increasingly,

if you're a demonologist,

you're out to explain

how witches work as well.

A particularly

important demonologist

was Heinrich Kramer.

He was a Dominican

monk looking for witches.

Kramer seems to

have been a maverick.

He had a very bad

reputation for being a drunk.

His fight against the

witches really begins as

a one-man crusade.

He goes to Rome and receives

an official writ by the Pope

that declares Kramer

to be responsible

for eradicating witches

in Southern Germany.

Kramer conducts a witch trial in

Innsbruck in Austria in 1485.

He encouraged people to denounce

others to him, persons

they regarded as witches.

And he gets the

names of seven women

brought to him in particular.

The leading one of these

women is the one called

Helena Schäuberin,

and he's particularly

interested in Helena.

So he decides to

hold a witch trial,

and Helena will

be the first accused

to be brought into court.

♪

Some of the officials

of the local bishop

actually stand up and

intervene in the trial.

And it becomes

apparent that while Kramer

thinks he is

absolutely in the right

and he has the Pope's

authority, the local clergy really

don't share that opinion.

They are not sure about

his witchcraft accusations.

And finally, the trial ended

as a total fiasco.

He thought he had

the power of the Pope,

but it turned out

that at the first test,

local Clergy don't believe him.

He had to leave

Innsbruck very hastily.

He had lost his

entire reputation.

He had made been the

laughing stock, essentially.

And he comes across

as a very creepy,

very strange, very

obsessive individual.

The people who throw

him out of Innsbruck

go as far as to say they

think he is demented.

They think he is mad.

Kramer was

obsessed with the idea

that women are weak,

weak in every respect.

Their bodies are weak,

their minds are weak,

and their souls are weak.

He's so upset about this failure

that he sits down

and writes a book

called Malleus Maleficarum

- "The Hammer of Witches."

This sets forth his

demonological ideas.

It is the one-stop shop for all

witch hunters for the

next couple of decades.

Everything you need

to know about witches

and witch hunts is in this book.

Malleus Maleficarum means,

when we translate it literally,

"The Hammer of the

Female Evil-Doers."

We sin because we are weak,

and we do not understand that

the devil tries to seduce them.

The devil deceives them.

He says witchcraft

isn't just harmful

magic because that idea

has been around for centuries.

What Kramer is saying

is witchcraft is now

a heretical act of making

pacts with the devil.

So he's really

shifting the emphasis

for elite, educated men

about what witchcraft was.

♪

Kramer's experience of an

unsuccessful trial in Innsbruck

mean that he says in

Malleus Maleficarum

that there's no need

for what he calls

the screeching and

posturing of lawyers.

He thinks lawyers are

obsessed with small details,

things like whether

their client is guilty or not.

What's required, he says,

and he says it quite flatly

and bluntly and

openly, is that witchcraft

suspects should be

tortured as soon as possible.

They can be tortured

very lightly, he says.

For example, you

might just hang them up

a little bit by their arms,

and you might just break

their joints a little bit

and just put them to a

little bit of terrible pain.

And he thinks this is

absolutely reasonable.

When you look at it now,

this is a recipe for people

to confess to things

they haven't done

and to be ex*cuted as

witches when, in fact, they're

nothing of the sort.

Malleus Maleficarum

is particularly popular

across the German-speaking

lands of what is now Germany

and what is now

Austria and Switzerland.

And he's very pleased to

report in Malleus Maleficarum

that other inquisitors

are taking up

the demonological work, too.

He reports that many of

them have had tens of people

ex*cuted in those

jurisdictions, and he sees this

as a big success.

With witches now a

serious threat to the

Christian world, panic

sweeps into the German lands,

where one of the first-ever

mass witch trial begins.

Hundreds of innocent

people will be ex*cuted.

As the hunts

spiral out of control,

no one is safe

from the merciless

and vengeful witch-finders.

♪

Germany is a real

hotspot of religious

conflict in the 15th,

16th and 17th centuries,

and I think that makes

German people think more

about the role that

they think the devil is

playing in their world,

the sort of temptations

to believe in the

wrong kind of religion,

temptations to sin, the

role of women within

religious communities,

and I think that makes them

particularly prone, I think,

to want to hold witch trials.

Modern-day

Germany doesn't exist.

There's a much, much

bigger political entity

in Central Europe

that's called the

Holy Roman Empire.

It's very, very, very

fragmented politically,

and what that

means is that political

and, very importantly,

legal authority

is really devolved to

regional or territorial rulers.

Trier is an independent

state ruled by

Johann von Schoenenberg

..who is a counter-Reformation

Roman Catholic fanatic.

In other words, he's

no ordinary archbishop.

He's somebody who's had

his consciousness raised

to believe that Satan

is out to destroy the one

true Catholic Church,

using witches as

Satan's instruments.

He's out to make sure that

Trier is kept clear of the lot.

Trier is in an exceptionally

bad way in the 1580s.

Hailstorms and

frosts hit the territory

in what's supposed to be the

summers and early autumns.

These communities

genuinely think that witches,

in league with the devil,

in league with each other,

are damaging their crops,

ruining their livelihoods,

causing them and

their families to fall ill.

If you believe in witchcraft,

you are likely to think that

the witch might be responsible

for your negative experience,

and you begin to look

around who could be a witch?

Trier and some of

the areas around it are

rather unusual in that

justice is often in the hands of

self-appointed committees

with a special remit to

find and try witches.

What are called Hexenausschusse

in German, and it translates

as "witch committees".

♪

The idea of Frankenstein-style

villagers running around

with flaming torches and

pitchforks is completely wrong.

The idea of impanelled

amateurs who are out

for blood is far closer.

They are really

village committees

that are here for

just one purpose -

to identify witches, and

that's precisely what we do.

If you find a person

you think is likely to have

a pact with the devil,

you would inform the

witch-hunting committee.

They would begin to collect

evidence, to hear witnesses.

You would pay a clerk,

and you would submit that to

the official of the prince,

arrest this person, and

bring him or her to court.

Witch-hunting committees

continue to spring

up in villages across the

region, each with an insatiable

appetite to eradicate the

ever-growing number of witches

they believe are harming

their communities.

The village witch-hunting

committees of the

Trier countryside have

no power over the city,

and therefore they

have no political impact.

What they have is

an emotional impact.

They get the citizens of

Trier thinking about witches.

There are lots of

rumours in the city of Trier

that alleged witches

had fled into the city

to avoid getting

arrested as witches.

There is a great wave going on.

More and more people

have been arrested.

Some prisons are filled up

with suspected so-called witches.

The trials spread

from village to village,

creating a wave of

terror so powerful it soon

engulfs the city of Trier.

And here, no-one is safe.

Not even the wealthiest

members of the elite.

Witchcraft is seen

as such a threat

that they decide to treat

witchcraft as what was

called an exceptional crime.

An accepted crime

can be treated in a

very short procedure.

A week from the

arrest to the execution.

In many cases, they

wouldn't even hear witnesses,

just interrogate the accused.

♪

With most crimes,

you prove through

witnesses and physical means

that somebody has committed it.

But because magic is

supposed to be invisible,

you cannot actually

employ those rules.

That's when the really

a*usive treatment of

suspects comes in, simply

to force people to confess.

They're doing what Heinrich

Kramer wanted them to do,

which is to say, witchcraft

is so bad, it's so terrifying,

we will just ignore the rules.

Even for the strange and

magical crime of witchcraft,

trials take place in

an established court,

overseen by an

all-powerful judge.

Presiding over the

witch trials in Trier

is the wealthy, ruthless and

unforgiving Dietrich Flade.

Dietrich Flade is probably

the most important

citizen of the city of

Trier in the early 1580s.

He's been building his

career there for decades.

He's served as

various city officials.

He is very much the

prince-elect as hitman.

He takes on the city on

behalf of the archbishop

and he beats it down to

increase the archbishop's

power over the city.

♪

He was also a

moneylender to the city,

but also to the

peasants in the rural area

and to citizens in Trier.

He didn't treat the people

who owed him money very well.

Flade was, for a time, the

main judge at the city of Trier.

In this function, he

absolutely believed

in the concept of

witchcraft himself.

He was present at the

questioning, at the t*rture.

He looked for better measures

to bring witches to confession.

The judges were, at least in

Germany, mostly lay judges.

Most of them had

never been to university.

Most of them had

never studied law.

Flade was an exception.

He had studied law,

he had a doctorate.

So Flade could have been

more critical of the witch trials.

So few trial records survived.

The remaining records tell us

that a number of trials happened

in the villages, but we

know fairly little about them.

Among the victims of

the witch hunts at Trier

was Margaretha Braun.

She was a poor washing woman.

She was called

a witch in public,

on the marketplace,

for everybody to hear.

If you do that, you

are very, very certain

that the person that you call

a witch cannot defend herself.

♪

After she was arrested,

she was tortured

7 times, very, very harshly,

but they could not gain

any confession out of her.

And this is when Flade steps

in to put more pressure on her.

- t*rture is often

used as a tool of terror.

It becomes extremely effective

because what you're doing

is you're instilling terror

in the entire community,

in the entire families, in

villages, in wider society.

And by doing that,

you create this sense of

I have to tell on others.

Also, when there are

grudges against people,

that they will create

stories or create evidence

that actually implicates

people, even when they haven't

actually done anything.

But the purpose

is to instill fear.

Flade subjects

Margaretha Braun to

merciless rounds of

brutal and intense t*rture.

She searches for a

confession to end the agony.

She admits to

committing a venial sin,

which is eating meat in a

broth, which is all she can

afford, on a fast day.

Of course, it's not directly

connected to witchcraft.

There's nothing

magical about that broth.

It is about the witches

being bad persons.

They might break

the fast by eating

a meat-based type

of food on a fast day.

Margaretha Braun

is the first case

where we do have trial

records, but only fragments.

So we do not know

if she was ex*cuted,

but I think she was

because Flade tried very hard

to bring her to confession.

Accusations and

trials continue to spread

ferociously across Trier.

Hundreds are interrogated,

confessions grow wilder,

and a terrifying

conspiracy emerges.

Unfortunately, in many

cases in Germany,

it's assumed that witches

can't do the damage they do

without there being a

whole bunch of them,

and so it's quite regular

for people under t*rture,

once they've confessed

to being a devil-worshipping

witch themselves, to

name other people with

whom they travelled

to the Witches' Sabbath.

They believe that witches

are gathering in large numbers.

They have to try and

explain how witches could

get to these Sabbaths

in large numbers at night,

cos they happen at night,

so that's where the belief

in magical flying comes

in, so they're flying

to the Sabbaths.

They're worshipping

the devil, not God.

They're kissing the

devil on the backside.

Importantly, they're

plotting their acts of harm

against the communities

around them,

sacrificing children,

eating babies.

The seduction by

the devil, the sexual

intercourse with the devil,

the evil deeds they did

at the Witches' Sabbath.

This is all your worst

fantasy nightmare of

what a heresy, a

witches' heresy might be,

because it suggests there's a

big group of witches out there,

and what that encourages

the courts to do is, they say,

"Who else did you see

at the Witches' Sabbath?"

If you're torturing someone

and asking them those

sorts of leading questions,

what happens is that

the suspects begin

denouncing other people.

Increasingly accused

witches are claiming to

have seen prominent

members of the city council at

Witches' Sabbaths.

They rely on

children's testimony,

and the idea is that these

boys have been taken

to the Witches' Sabbath,

and they're used as a way

into this hidden world,

and it's their denunciations

that help speed up

the trial processes.

A 16-year-old boy from

the countryside near

Trier, who's been giving

witness against accused witches,

mentions that he was taken

along to the Witches' Sabbath

..and he saw Flade there.

The accusation that a

powerful member of the

elite, like Dietrich

Flade, has taken part in

the Witches' Sabbath,

sends shockwaves

through the city.

Other witnesses emerge,

each telling a story of

Flade's diabolical deeds.

A picture is forming.

Denunciations against

Flade, accelerated.

Witches said that Flade was

the master of the Sabbath.

More and more named

him personally and said

it was Dietrich Flade,

he was there, he came

there in a golden carriage

drawn by black horses.

They say that he is profiting

from the weather magic,

in other words, the bad weather

that the witches are causing

is making the harvest fail,

and that works to the advantage

of Flade and other men like him.

They've got stocks

and stores of grain.

They're believed to be

selling those stores of

grain for a high profit.

Flade was one of

the most outspoken

supporters of the

Prince Archbishop.

The Prince Archbishop

looked the other way.

The Prince Archbishop

didn't allow a witch trial

against Flade to begin.

♪

In 1588, a commission

is established

to look for

circumstantial evidence

and to look for all

these denunciations

made against Flade.

So Flade is well aware

that something is going on.

He knows perfectly

well that after a certain

amount of denunciations,

it will get difficult for

him to avoid the trial.

Crowds in the street

are crying out for his

blood or his cinders.

He is already convicted in

the court of public opinion.

The key accusation

against Flade,

which makes his all-powerful

master, the Prince Elector,

abandon him, is

that Flade, on doing

his deal with the

devil, agreed to try and

m*rder his master.

Flade's unlucky in that the

health of the Prince Elector

actually has been bad

lately, and so it's quite easy to

persuade a man who is ill

and can't really work out why,

and over whom the medics

are scratching their head,

that the solution to

his problems is that an

attempt is being made

to k*ll him through a

mysterious and lingering

malady of bewitchment,

and in the end, he

comes to believe it.

Flade's downfall goes

through various stages.

He attempts to run.

He actually gets

out of the city,

but the guy who's

transporting him realises

that he's taking a

wanted criminal away

and pinions him and takes him

back again and hands him over.

After that, he's put

under house arrest,

he makes one more

escape attempt.

Finally, Prince-elect

gives way and allows

Flade to be put on trial,

and the moment that

happens, he's doomed.

Flade understood witch trials.

He had been a judge himself.

He knew that there was

very little he could do.

He knew that the

court would t*rture him

and that he would

eventually confess.

He would have been

psychologically in quite

a hopeless position, quite

a hopeless frame of mind.

He would probably have

been stripped, manhandled,

he'd probably

probed and pricked.

So the physical impact

of that humiliation

for a man of his standing

and a man of his wealth

would have been

pretty devastating,

and that's even before you

get to the actual physical t*rture.

♪

The standard German

and Swiss instrument of

t*rture at this period

is the strappado.

You have your

hands tied behind your

back, a rope is tied

around your wrists,

and then you throw the rope

through a hook in the ceiling

and simply pull

on the other end.

Of course it's intended

to create maximum pain,

but what it also does is it

causes physical injuries,

so it can create tears in

the ligaments and tendons.

You may be beaten

in that position, you

may have fractures, you

may have broken bones,

you may be beaten on

your head at the same time.

Again, that can

lead to head injuries.

People can also start to

hallucinate with intense pain

and under those conditions.

You're left in that state,

and there's a sense of

creating humiliation and shame.

You can lose a sense

of where you are.

You literally lose

your sense of self,

and that's the purpose

of t*rture, right?

Because then you're malleable,

you can be told what to say,

you can be forced.

It creates this

internal conflict

for those that are

being tortured as to,

do I surrender to the

demands of the torturer,

even if it means I'm lying

and I know it's not the truth,

or do I hold on to

my sense of truth

and know that I will

be k*lled anyway?

Months of t*rture

exact a brutal toll.

Flade finally breaks.

The interrogators have

forced a confession.

♪

Flade confessed

to being a witch.

He had met the devil.

He had had intercourse

with the devil.

He made the pact.

The devil gave him

the ability to use magic

to his own advantage.

He admitted to having

planned to k*ll people,

to make people ill.

♪

He had gone to the Sabbath.

He accepted his role as

the master of the witches.

With every word

he sealed his fate,

but he knew already, I

suppose, when he faced his

judge, that it was over,

that there was no way

out of this anymore.

♪

Flade awaits his verdict.

His fate is sealed.

He is found guilty of witchcraft

and sentenced to death.

♪

People convicted of witchcraft

are regarded as heretics

as well as criminals,

and it was believed

that the bodies of heretics

were actually unclean,

that they could blight a

community with ill fortune.

Alive or dead, their

corpses needed to be burned

to remove the contagion

from the community.

Most people sentenced

to burn for witchcraft

were dispatched by a much

more humane means beforehand.

The two usual choices

were strangling them

or beheading them,

and both of those are

relatively merciful,

relatively quick ways to go.

Flade perhaps thought

until the last minute

that this ordeal would

not happen to him,

that he perhaps

could get out of it,

that he was spared the

fire, but he was not.

Justice has to be public.

This is what the people of

the early modern period expect.

Numerous people came

to witness his execution.

Mean he was a celebrity.

This was a very prominent case.

We need to remember

as well that he would

have looked so

different from before.

You know, he would have

been a rich man before,

a beautifully dressed

man, a wealthy man.

You know, he's in prison

for weeks, he's tortured.

He would have looked

almost unrecognisable,

probably, by the

time of his execution

because of the treatment

that he's undergone.

He made a last speech,

a very pious one,

and that he was

righteously treated and

that the people should

take an example by his fate.

♪

The only thing he has left

is to die a good death.

That was believed to be

very important at the time,

that you go to meet your

maker in a sort of penitent

and kind of dignified way.

The idea was that

if you've confessed,

that would stand you

in good stead with God

when you go into the next life.

Crowds gathered to watch

the once powerful judge

meet his terrible fate.

Flade's execution

does send a message

that nobody is really

absolutely safe from accusation.

If you can accuse Flade,

an affluent man, from

the city of witchcraft,

you can accuse

everybody of witchcraft.

It becomes possible to

take out other city leaders.

They tend to be

former city officials

who've lost power and are

now vulnerable to their rivals.

Trier becomes the example

for witch hunts done right,

witch hunts who do not

respect social status anymore.

Everybody could be a witch.

Dietrich Flade may be

dead, but the hunt rages on.

What started as a

crusade against evil

and suspicious women in

the villages surrounding Drier

has now ensnared powerful

members of the city's elite.

In the electorate of Trier,

probably between

800 and 1,000 people

are ex*cuted for witchcraft.

The wave of witch hunts

Flade fell victim to

continued for another ten

years, roughly, after his death.

The prince elector,

Johann von Schoenenberg,

has become genuinely

concerned about the

fact that the witch trials

have gone on for so long,

the fact that the witch trials

have begun to incorporate,

you know, men and members of

the social and political elites.

In 1591, he issues his ordinance

concerning witch

hunting committees.

This ordinance is an

attempt to rein in the activities

of the committees.

The ordinance has never

tried to end the activities

just like that.

The point was merely to

bring them under the control

of the representatives

of the government.

However, this ordinance

had not such a great success.

Because witch hunting

committees could still be established,

they were still

working together,

so its success was rather low.

The fears about

witchcraft were kept

going, the knowledge about

who was a witch,

who might be a witch

was kept going, but

it was also spread.

You know, these are very

public events, the executions,

so it's actually quite

hard in one of these

smallish territories to

say no to your subjects

when they actually want

to keep hunting witches.

♪

By the mid-1590s,

there are signs that

people think it's time

to wind witch hunting down.

Economic conditions

improved somewhat.

Some of those real

pressures, those really intense

pressures on the economy,

they died down to some extent.

But belief is

absolutely still there.

It's not that people

stopped believing.

Trier was an influence

on all later witch hunts simply

because it was so well-known.

So what do we

know about witches?

We know what we have

learned during the witch trials

from the confessions

of the witches,

and we get that

type of information

in demonological

books that refer to Trier.

♪

Trier's witch hunt

is big European news,

and that's because this is

the age of the printing press,

and it generates a lot of print.

Pamphlets were printed.

Some of these pamphlets

were also translated

in Dutch language, in English

language, in Danish language.

The Trier Hexentanzplatz is

a very, very detailed

image from 1593,

which shows this

supposed Witch's Sabbath

in absolute immense detail.

So we've got everything

from the King of the Sabbath

sitting at a table feasting.

You've got Flade's supposed

golden coach approaching.

You've got witch

Clerics doing magic.

You've got witches flying.

It's incredibly detailed.

This is the best means

of spreading witch hunting

among ordinary people.

You only need to have one

literate person in a community

who can read out

the text to the pub

to get everybody in the

community up to speed

on how to have a witch hunt.

♪

The great German

opponent of the witch hunts,

Friedrich Spee, called Germany

the mother of the witches.

And he was right.

About half of all the people

ex*cuted for witchcraft

worldwide during the

early modern period

came from Germany.

♪

It was the first

Catholic witch hunt

gaining such a popularity

and such a media hype.

These witch trials

were recognized

all over the Holy Roman

Empire, but also in other

parts of Europe.

Trier had proven

that the witches

were really about to take

over, that they could really

threaten the entire society.

In just over a decade,

hundreds of people have

been accused of witchcraft

and ex*cuted.

Although the

panic in Trier fades,

it marks the beginning

of the witch hunts.

Europe and North America

will soon be consumed

by the bloodthirsty

drive to k*ll witches.

Trier may have been

the first mass witch trial,

but it won't be the last.