Original subtitles

♪ ♪

[narrator] 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.

♪ ♪

[indistinct shouting]

[narrator] 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.

[narrator] 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.

[narrator] 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.

♪ ♪

[crow squawking]

- 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.

[narrator] As the 13th and 14th centuries pass,

perceptions shift, and the world becomes dangerous

for anyone identified as a witch.

[Marion Gibson] 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.

[indistinct shouting]

[Marion Gibson] 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."

[Ronald Hutton] 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.

[crows squawking]

- 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.

[Malcolm Gaskill] People aren't comfortable embracing these

different divergent views.

There can only be one right one.

[Marion Gibson] 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.

[Malcolm Gaskill] 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.

[Marion Gibson] The Catholic church decides that actually,

there really are witches, and it's the church's

job to root them out.

[Ronald Hutton] 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.

[Marion Gibson] During the mid 15th century, there were

sporadic witch trials, and lots of people started

writing demonologies.

[Ronald Hutton] 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.

[Marion Gibson] 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.

[Marion Gibson] Kramer conducts a witch trial in

Innsbruck in Austria in 1485.

[Johannes Dillinger] He encouraged people to denounce

others to him, persons they regarded as witches.

[Marion Gibson] 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.

[Johannes Dillinger] And finally, the trial ended

as a total fiasco.

[Marion Gibson] He thought he had the power of the Pope,

but it turned out that at the first test,

local Clergy don't believe him.

[Johannes Dillinger] He had to leave Innsbruck very hastily.

He had lost his entire reputation.

He had made been the laughing stock, essentially.

[Marion Gibson] 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.

[Johannes Dillinger] 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.

[Marion Gibson] 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.

[Johannes Dillinger] 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."

[creepy giggling]

We sin because we are weak, and we do not understand that

the devil tries to seduce them.

The devil deceives them.

[Alison Rowlands] 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.

[narrator] 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.

♪ ♪

[Marion Gibson] 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.

[Alison Rowlands] 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.

[Ronald Hutton] 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.

[thunder]

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.

[Alison Rowland] 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.

[Johnnes Dillinger] 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?

[Ronald Hutton] 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.

[Alison Rowlands] What are called Hexenausschusse

in German, and it translates as "witch committees".

♪ ♪

[Ronald Hutton] 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.

[Johannes Dillinger] 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.

[narrator] 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.

[Ronald Hutton] 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.

[Rita Voltmer] 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.

[narrator] 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.

[Alison Rowlands] Witchcraft is seen as such a threat

that they decide to treat witchcraft as what was

called an exceptional crime.

[Rita Volmer] An accepted crime can be treated in a

very short procedure.

[Johannes Dillinger] A week from the arrest to the execution.

In many cases, they wouldn't even hear witnesses,

just interrogate the accused.

♪ ♪

[Ronald Hutton] 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.

[Alison Rowlands] 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.

[muffled screaming]

[narrator] 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.

[Ronald Hutton] 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.

♪ ♪

[Rita Voltmer] He was also a moneylender to the city,

but also to the peasants in the rural area

and to citizens in Trier.

[Johannes Dillinger] 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.

[Rita Voltmer] He was present at the questioning, at the torture.

He looked for better measures to bring witches to confession.

[Johannes Dillinger] 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.

[Rita Voltmer] She was a poor washing woman.

[Johannes Dillinger] 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.

♪ ♪

[Rita Voltmer] 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.

[woman screaming]

[narrator] Flade subjects Margaretha Braun to

merciless rounds of brutal and intense torture.

She searches for a confession to end the agony.

[Ronald Hutton] She admits to committing a venial sin,

which is eating meat in a broth, which is all she can

afford, on a fast day.

[Johannes Dillinger] 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.

[distorted screaming]

[Rita Voltmer] 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.

[narrator] Accusations and trials continue to spread

ferociously across Trier.

Hundreds are interrogated, confessions grow wilder,

and a terrifying conspiracy emerges.

[Ronald Hutton] 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.

[distorted, evil laughing]

[Alison Rowlands] 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.

[Rita Voltmer] The seduction by the devil, the sexual

intercourse with the devil, the evil deeds they did

at the Witches' Sabbath.

[Alison Rowlands] 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.

[Ronald Hutton] Increasingly accused witches are claiming to

have seen prominent members of the city council at

Witches' Sabbaths.

[Alison Rowlands] 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.

[Ronald Hutton] 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.

[narrator] 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.

[Rita Voltmer] Denunciations against Flade, accelerated.

[Johannes Dillinger] Witches said that Flade was the master of the Sabbath.

[Rita Voltmer] 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.

[Alison Rowlands] 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.

[Johannes Dillinger] 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.

♪ ♪

[Rita Voltmer] 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.

[Ronald Hutton] Crowds in the street are crying out for his

blood or his cinders.

[indistinct shouting]

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.

[Johannes Dillinger] 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.

[Alison Rowlands] 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.

♪ ♪

[Ronald Hutton] The standard German and Swiss instrument of

torture at this period is the strappado.

[Johannes Dillinger] 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.

[Flade moaning in pain]

[Nimisha Patel] 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?

[narrator] Months of torture exact a brutal toll.

Flade finally breaks.

The interrogators have forced a confession.

♪ ♪

[Johannes Dillinger] 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.

♪ ♪

[narrator] Flade awaits his verdict.

His fate is sealed.

He is found guilty of witchcraft and sentenced to death.

♪ ♪

[Ronald Hutton] 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.

[fire crackling]

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.

[Rita Voltmer] 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.

[Johannes Dilliinger] 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.

[Alison Rowlands] 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.

[Rita Voltmer] 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.

♪ ♪

[Alison Rowlands] 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.

[narrator] Crowds gathered to watch the once powerful judge

meet his terrible fate.

[fire crackling]

[Alison Rowlands] Flade's execution does send a message

that nobody is really absolutely safe from accusation.

[Johannes Dillinger] If you can accuse Flade,

an affluent man, from the city of witchcraft,

you can accuse everybody of witchcraft.

[Ronald Huttdon] 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.

[Johannes Dillinger] Trier becomes the example

for witch hunts done right, witch hunts who do not

respect social status anymore.

Everybody could be a witch.

[fire crackling]

[narrator] 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.

[Alison Rowlands] In the electorate of Trier,

probably between 800 and 1,000 people

are executed for witchcraft.

[Johannes Dillinger] The wave of witch hunts

Flade fell victim to continued for another ten

years, roughly, after his death.

[Alison Rowlands] 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.

[Johannes Dillinger] 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.

[Rita Voltmer] 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.

[Alison Rowlands] 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.

♪ ♪

[Ronald Hutton] By the mid-1590s,

there are signs that people think it's time

to wind witch hunting down.

[Alison Rowlands] 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.

[birds chirping]

[Johannes Dillinger] 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.

♪ ♪

[Ronald Hutton] 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.

[Rita Voltmer] Pamphlets were printed.

Some of these pamphlets were also translated

in Dutch language, in English language, in Danish language.

[Alison Rowlands] 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.

[Ronald Hutton] 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.

♪ ♪

[Johannes Dillinger] 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.

♪ ♪

[Rita Voltmer] 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.

[Johannes Dillinger] Trier had proven that the witches

were really about to take over, that they could really

threaten the entire society.

[narrator] 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.