 The need to find a scapegoat for calamities such as the Black Plague, which claimed 2,000 area residents (25% of the city population) in 1564, led to an escalation in witch-hunting that reached its peak in 1599.A plaque on the old city wall marks the spot where burnings were carried out.The seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries were turbulent times for Freiburg.