The Witch Hunts – Germany’s Darkest Hour

On a cold winter morning in 1626, a wagon rolled slowly through the streets of Würzburg. There were 19 people inside. Their faces were frozen in fear. None of them were guilty. But none of them would leave that car alive. The city’s residents hid behind their shutters. Some prayed, some watched silently, for everyone knew that tomorrow new names would take the place of those executed today.

This scene had become quite commonplace in the heart of Germany at the beginning of the 17th century. The story we are telling today is one of the darkest chapters of European history. It is the story of the witch hunts in the dioceses of Bamberg and Würzburg, which cost thousands of lives. To understand where this story begins, one must first understand Germany at that time.

The end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries were on the brink of a nightmare for the Holy Roman Empire. Europe experienced a climate change that is now called the Little Ice Age. The summers became shorter, the winters became harsher and longer. Harvests failed, one after another, and famines swept through the villages.

While people starved, livestock perished, and fields froze, people searched for an explanation. A science that could explain such natural disasters did not yet exist. Only one question remained. Who brought this misfortune upon them? At the same time, religious wars tore the continent apart. The Reformation, initiated by Martin Luther, plunged the Catholic Church into a struggle for its survival.

The so-called Counter-Reformation demanded strict discipline and control in order to regain lost territories. Germany was fragmented into a multitude of small states in the middle of this conflict. Two of them, Bamberg and Würzburg, had a special form of government, the prince-bishopric. Here the bishop was simultaneously the religious and the political authority.

Canon law and secular law merged. This meant that a bishop could judge both souls and bodies. In Bamberg, Johann Georg the second Fuchs von Dornheim assumed this power. History should remember him as the witch bishop. When he took office, he burned with the dream of making his city perfectly clean in the eyes of God. His most important supporter in this endeavor was his advisor Friedrich Förner.

Förner preached and wrote treatises on the fact that witchcraft was a real and widespread danger. In his view, the witches hidden in the city were like a disease, a plague that would poison the whole of society if left untreated. This rhetoric spread rapidly among a population already fueled by fear.

In Würzburg, there was a similar figure. Philip Adolf von Ehrenberg was known as both a pious and a merciless ruler. He too made it his mission to cleanse his own country of witches. Two prince-bishoprics, independent of each other but with the same mindset, waged war against their own people during the same years.

The mechanism of this war functioned with frightening simplicity. Usually under torture, one person would name another. This name was immediately arrested, interrogated, and almost always subjected to torture. According to the legal understanding of that time, a confession extracted under torture was considered proof of the truth.

Nobody thought that someone might lie just to escape the pain. Or if you thought about it, nobody cared. The torturer wanted to hear not only the confession of the person being interrogated, but also other names. Thus, every confession became a new arrest list. This system was like a self-feeding machine.

Once started, it was almost impossible to stop. A separate building was erected in Bamberg for this process. The Drutenhaus, the witch’s house. It was far more than just a prison. Inside were specially equipped interrogation rooms. Devices for torture instruments hung on the walls. The mere existence of this building sent a message to the citizens of the city.

The witch hunt was no longer a temporary uproar, but an institutional policy. Prisoners were held here for days, sometimes weeks, and interrogated until they made the required confession. Some died, some lost their minds. The survivors almost always provided the desired confession. The victims included people from all walks of life.

Old women, widows and poor farmers were the first targets, because they were already on the margins of society and unprotected. But over time, the hunting area expanded. Children were accused, priests were accused. Even wealthy merchants and prominent figures in the city administration could not escape this list.

Fear knew no class distinctions. The methods of torture were carefully defined in the legal texts of that time. The interrogators used instruments that pinched the prisoner’s fingers. They crushed legs with heavy iron clamps. In some cases, the prisoner was suspended from the ceiling and pulled with weights until his shoulders were dislocated.

These procedures usually took place under medical supervision, because the victim had to remain alive until he confessed. His death would have disrupted the course of the proceedings. Although the courts had established rules on how often torture could be repeated, these rules offered little protection in practice.

Because if an interrogation session was interrupted and resumed days later, this formally counted as a new session and the border started again. Thus, a person could suffer many times the legally permitted duration of torture. The court itself also operated according to a strange logic. If the accused did not confess, this was considered proof that the devil had given him special power and the torture was intensified.

If he confessed, this was considered proof of guilt and he was sentenced to death. There was no way out. Some prisoners asked their torturers directly what confession they wanted to hear, just to avoid further suffering, and then repeated exactly that scenario. Thus, the court records were less a reflection of reality than the stories that the interrogators had hoped to hear.

Details such as witches’ sabbaths, carnal intercourse with the devil, or curses against neighbors were in reality clues that came from the interrogators’ own questions. At this point, we must address one of the most harrowing documents that history has handed down to us. The story of the Bamberg mayor Johannes Junius. Junius had been active in the city’s politics since 1608 and was elected mayor several times over many years.

A highly respected man. One reason for the suspicion against him was that his own wife had previously been executed for witchcraft. In April 1628, another city official named Georg Neudecker was arrested and, under torture, named Junius. Junius was also arrested in June of the same year.

Initially, he was interrogated without torture and protested his innocence. He demanded that he be shown a single person who had seen him at such a meeting. But the court was not satisfied with that. A torture session lasting weeks began. Junius resisted again and again. But finally his body could no longer endure it and he confessed what the court expected: that he had participated in a witches’ sabbath and made a pact with the devil.

During this torture, even before his execution, Junius secretly wrote a letter in his cell. He handed it over to a guard who had access to his cell, so that he could deliver it to his daughter Veronica. In the letter he wrote:

“I have been imprisoned unjustly, have been tortured unjustly, and now must die unjustly.”

He described how the executioner had put clamps on his fingers until blood oozed from under his nails, so that he could not use his hands for four weeks. Then his hands were tied behind his back and he was pulled upwards, and his leg screws were applied. In his letter, he also named the six people who had testified against him and stated that they had all lied.

He told his daughter:

“Do not show this letter to anyone, because if it is found, I know I will be tortured again and executed instantly.”

The letter ended with a farewell in which he wrote:

“I will never see you again.”

This letter has survived to this day and is considered by historians to be one of the most important primary sources that reveals the true nature of the Bamberg witch hunts, because the official court records claimed that he confessed of his own free will without torture. The letter proved the exact opposite. Junius was executed and burned in 1628 along with other victims. His story was no exception.

In a similar way, hundreds, even thousands of people shared the same fate. According to estimates by historians, more than 1,000 people were executed for witchcraft in Bamberg alone between 1626 and 1631.

In Würzburg, this number exceeded 900. Given the population figures at the time, these numbers were unimaginably high. A small town burned a significant portion of its own inhabitants within just a few years. The executions usually took place in public squares. It was not just a punishment, but also a performance.

The population was called upon to watch the executions so that they would be convinced that evil had been punished and society purified. But these spectacles only increased the fear, because everyone knew that whoever was watching today could be sitting in the same car tomorrow. The fate of the children was particularly harrowing.

In Würzburg, during the eight-year tenure of Prince-Bishop Philip Adolf von Ehrenberg, even his own nephew was accused of witchcraft and executed. First he was beheaded, then his body was burned. If a bishop could so easily sacrifice his own relative, the child of an ordinary family had far fewer chances.

According to records confirmed by historians, at least 49 children under the age of 12 were executed. Most of them came from the orphanage and the Julius Hospital school. The ages of the executed children ranged from 7, 10, 12, 14 to 15 years. Among them were children who had never previously been suspected and who were described by their teachers as successful students.

Some written sources of that time even report that three-year-old and four-year-old children were interrogated because they were suspected of associating with the devil. Approximately 300 children in total. This shows how deeply rooted the conviction was among the clergy and lawyers of that time that the devil knew no age.

But how did this horror come to an end? Here, a strange turn of events unfolds. While the Thirty Years’ War ravaged Germany, the Swedish King Gustav II Adolf won a great victory in the Battle of Breitenfeld in September 1631 and led his troops further south towards Franconia.

Bamberg and Würzburg now came under threat from the Protestant Swedish armed forces. This political and military crisis shifted the priorities of witch hunts in one fell swoop. The administrations of the prince-bishoprics now had to deal with the defense of their cities, the influx of refugees, and the war economy.

The witch trials slowed down, then came to a standstill. Bishop Philip Adolf von Ehrenberg died in Würzburg on July 16, 1631, before the Swedish threat had fully unfolded. His death and the immediate pressure of the war made it almost impossible for the new administration to continue the witch hunts.

A modern visitor to Bamberg or Würzburg does not recognize the traces of this history at first glance. Beneath the baroque architecture of the cities, the beautiful squares and the bridges where tourists take their photos, lies a hidden past in which thousands of people were turned to ash.

The remains of the witch house are no longer part of everyday city life. But for historians and researchers, they remain an important subject of study. What does this story teach us? Perhaps the most important lesson is how fear and uncertainty can drive even educated societies to cruelty. Those in charge in Bamberg and Würzburg were not uneducated people.

Men like Förner were among the most learned clergymen of their time. But education was no shield against fanaticism. On the contrary, educated minds only made this persecution more systematic, institutional, and deadly.

The letter that Johannes Junius wrote to his daughter is still read today and is considered by historians to be unique among the confessions of that time, because it gives voice to the victim, not to the authority. His words contain the love of a father, the despair of a man, and proof of how low a society can fall. Junius was first executed by the sword on August 6, 1628, thanks to the privilege of his office. His body was then cremated. Ordinary victims didn’t even receive this privilege. They were burned alive.

Historians today consider the cases of Bamberg and Würzburg to be among the most intense and deadly examples of the European witch hunts. In these two small prince-bishoprics, the persecution claimed more victims in a short time than some large kingdoms recorded in witch executions over centuries. This fact leaves researchers with a question.

Why did such an intense wave of violence break out in such small areas? The answer lies largely in the combination of centralized power and religious fanaticism. In large kingdoms, the power of the king usually provided a counterweight to the local courts. But in small principalities like Bamberg and Würzburg, the bishop himself was the one who made the law and enforced it at the same time.

There was no control mechanism that could have stopped him. Anyone walking through the streets of Bamberg or Würzburg today might not notice that they are walking on ground where fear once reigned. But history continues to speak from these silent stones, and sometimes the darkest past hides beneath the brightest cities.

Perhaps the baroque churches, the beautiful squares and the tourist bridges that we look at today are just the scab over a wound that we have covered. And the real question that remains is perhaps this: How quickly can a society, when gripped by fear and fanaticism, actually become the executioner of its own people?