Witches: Truth Behind the Trials (2024) s01e02 Episode Script

1
♪
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 executed 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
war across Europe,
much of which is religious
war 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, killed
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 executed 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
executed 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 executed.
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
abusive 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 torture.
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.
- Torture 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 torture.
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 executed,
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 torture,
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
murder 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 kill 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 torture 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 torture.
♪
The standard German
and Swiss instrument of
torture 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 torture, 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 killed anyway?
Months of torture
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 kill 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 executed 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
executed 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 executed.
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 kill witches.
Trier may have been
the first mass witch trial,
but it won't be the last.