Under the code of law that existed at the time, being accused of wrong-doing made a person “semi-guilty.” This permitted the use of torture, and torture was applied not only until the people confessed their crimes, but until they described (imaginary) circumstances and accomplices.
The letter of a condemned burgomaster (to his daughter) still survives. He wrote:
Now, dear child, here you have all my confession, for which I must die. And they are sheer lies and made-up things, so help me God. For all this I was forced to say through fear of the torture which was threatened beyond what I had already endured. For they never leave off with the torture till one confesses something; be he never so good, he must be a witch. Nobody escapes, though he were an earl. . . .,
Dear child, keep this letter secret so that people do not find it, else I shall be tortured most piteously and the jailers will be beheaded. So strictly is it forbidden. . . . Dear child, pay this man a dollar . . . . I have taken several days to write this: my hands are both lame. I am in a sad plight. . . .
Good night, for your father Johannes Junius will never see you more. July 24, 1628. (Klaits, 130)
Klaits mentions a witch hunt in the German village of Ellwangen in 1611, in which the torture of one unpopular 70-year-old woman led to the torture and execution of over 400 people. A contemporary observer of the Ellwangen “trials” wrote:
“I do not see where this case will lead and what effect it will have, for this evil has so taken over, and like the plague has affected so many, that if the magistrates continue their office, in a few years the city will be in miserable ruins.” (Klaits, p. 144)
There may have been genuine witches who were prosecuted during this chaotic time, but the relatively abundant historical evidence available to researchers implies that the overwhelming majority of those executed for witchcraft were innocent people caught up in a tragic hysteria.
