Würzburg in the late 1620s shows what the procedure does when nothing stops it. The prince-bishopric prosecuted witchcraft on a scale that reached far beyond the usual profile of the accused. Contemporary lists of those condemned include not only poor women but children, students, servants of good households, town councillors, and priests and canons of the bishop's own church.
That escalation is not an anomaly, it is the machinery working. A confession obtained under torture had to name accomplices; the accomplices were arrested and tortured; they named others. There is no social ceiling on such a chain, and once it climbs above the poor and the marginal it starts consuming the very people who run it. Several German territories in these years experienced the same thing, Bamberg most notoriously, and it is one of the reasons prosecution eventually became politically intolerable: it stopped being something done to other people.
Totals for the episode vary widely between accounts and no single figure is established. Contemporary execution lists survive for parts of it, the records are incomplete, and different authors count the city, the diocese and the wider territory differently. The atlas states the character of the episode and declines to state a number.
The Thirty Years War is the background throughout: dislocation, plague, failed harvests, and armies moving through.