One of the misfortunes of history is that we couldn't burn Hitler and Himmler at the stake.
I am reading a book about the Middle Ages. Up until the late Middle Ages, Church doctrine was to deny the reality of witches and dismiss the concept as nonsense. Then the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period became a period of social instability. The were severe famines during this period, religious wars, social upheaval, and a kind of persecuting society took hold -
elderly unmarried women became a target, or anyone who seemed like a drain or burden to society. It didn't help that the Protestant Reformation had emptied the convents, and the former nuns constituted a significant population of unmarried and even elderly women which society may have looked upon as a drain on resources, unable to support themselves, maybe even eccentric. That's the kind of people that were frequently and falsely accused of witchcraft, mainly just to get them out of the way.