The Witch Trials — Faith, Fear, and Fire

Between the 15th and 18th centuries, tens of thousands of people — most of them women — were tortured and executed across Europe and America in one of the darkest chapters of human history.

They called it a holy war. A war against evil itself. But it was really something far simpler — and far more human. Fear.

From the icy valleys of Switzerland to the burning fields of Germany, from the courts of England to the Puritan colonies of New England, panic spread like a plague. Neighbours denounced neighbours. Priests and judges sanctioned torture in the name of God. And when Europe’s witch fires finally dimmed, the hysteria crossed the Atlantic and re-ignited in Salem, Massachusetts.

This episode of History Declassified unpacks the full arc of the witch trials — the theology, the terror, and the power. We trace how a single verse from Exodus became the death sentence for tens of thousands, how the Malleus Maleficarumtransformed superstition into law, and how mass fear turned ordinary people into executioners.

We explore Switzerland’s brutal early purges, Germany’s record-breaking executions, and the political use of witch hunts as tools of control. Then we cross the ocean to 1692 — to the small colonial town of Salem — where imported European hysteria collided with Puritan fanaticism, and twenty innocent lives were lost under the same delusion that had consumed the Old World.

But this isn’t just a story about the past.
It’s about what happens when belief replaces evidence, when fear becomes virtue, and when power cloaks itself in moral certainty.

The witch trials weren’t born of darkness — they were born of conviction. And their legacy still haunts every society that values purity over truth.