Conclusion

The Bamberg witch hunt continued to claim more victims until 1630.  During the hunt, elite families who had had relatives arrested fled to Nuremberg, from which they launched several petitions to the Holy Roman Emperor and other powerful persons to call the Prince-Bishop of Bamberg to account (Behringer 316).  An exemplary figure in this was former Bamberg city councillor G.H. Flöckh, whose wife Dorothea had been arrested.  Unfortunately for the Flöckhs, attempts to pressure the prince-bishop into releasing Dorothea only succeeded in accelerating and increasing the harshness of her trial and she was executed on 17 May 1630 (Behringer, 317).  By that time, the opposition to the witch hunt in Bamberg had reached such proportions, and included both the highest political and religious officials, the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope, that the hunt was insupportable.  After the Diet of Regensburg (3 July -12 November 1630), the judicial process used to denounce and try witches in Bamberg was reconfigured to protect potentially innocent people but these reforms made little progress until the bishop himself fled Bamberg (Behringer, 320).  After five years of brutal persecution the trials in Bamberg finally halted resulting in the release of nearly all the remaining prisoners, but like all persecutions it left a legacy of broken communities and families like Veronica’s.