Counting proceeds jurisdiction by jurisdiction and then extrapolates across the territories whose records are lost. Historians disagree about how far to extrapolate, whether to count deaths in custody before verdict, and whether prosecutions under adjacent charges belong in the total. The disagreement is methodological, and the popular nine million figure is refuted rather than disputed.
What would resolve this Systematic archival counts for the jurisdictions that have not yet been worked through, published with their own margins, so that the extrapolated share of the total falls. A comparable convention for counting deaths in custody would also narrow it.
Resolution Two of the entity's own execution-estimate facts settle this together. The nine-million figure, traced to Gottfried Christian Voigt's 1784 extrapolation from Quedlinburg's own local records, is debunked: modern archival counting refutes it by a factor of more than a hundred. The debated companion fact gives the narrowed figure the question asks for: regional archival historians (Behringer, Levack, Goodare, Hutton), working jurisdiction by jurisdiction, give a total in the tens of thousands, each stating a method and a margin. The figure has been narrowed as far as the surviving records allow; a tighter single number is not available and none is claimed. · August 8, 2026
ResolvedEarly modern archival history; historical demographyWolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts: A Global History