Operation Gomorrah - The British bomb Hamburg causing a firestorm that kills 42,000 German civilians.

During World War II Hamburg suffered a series of devastating air raids which killed 42,000 German civilians. Through this, and the new zoning guidelines of the 1960s, the inner city lost much of its architectural past.

The bombings culminated in the spawning of the so-called “Feuersturm” (firestorm). Quite literally a tornado of fire, this phenomenon created a huge outdoor blast furnace, containing winds of up to 240 km/h (150 mph) and reaching temperatures of 800 °C (1,500 °F). It caused asphalt on the streets to burst into flame, cooked people to death in air-raid shelters, sucked pedestrians off the sidewalks like leaves into a vacuum cleaner and incinerated some eight square miles (21 km²) of the city. Most of the casualties (40,000) caused by Operation Gomorrah happened on this single night.