Paul Peters staggered out of the bunker, driven into the Hamburg street by the increasing heat bomb after bomb had inflicted on his apartment building. As people rushed outside, they were hit with hurricane-force winds, flying sparks, and burning debris.

It was 1943, and the attack the Allies codenamed Operation Gomorrah had transformed an orderly harbor city at the heart of the German war machine into a living hell.

“The firestorm was so strong that hats were torn off heads and whirled through the air like burning fireballs,” he later wrote in an eyewitness report. “Even little children, running around alone, were bodily picked up from the ground and thrown through the air.” Though Peters survived the night’s air raid,