BERLIN (AP)–King Charles III commemorated the more than 30,000 people, mostly German civilians, who were killed in the Allied bombing of Hamburg almost 80 years ago as he visited the northern city Friday on the last leg of his first foreign trip since becoming monarch.

The attack in July 1943 carried out by British and American planes using incendiary bombs was a response to Nazi Germany’s deadly aerial raids on Britain. It resulted in a firestorm which destroyed large parts of the city and remains a painful memory in the Hanseatic port’s proud history.

Charles laid a wreath at the ruined church of St. Nikolai, now a memorial site, and listened to Hamburg’s bishop Kirsten Fehrs read the Coventry Litany of Reconciliation written to commemorate the destruction of the English city of Coventry by German bombers in 1940.

Earlier, Charles and Camilla visited a memorial to the Kindertransporte, or children’s transports, when more than 10,000 Jewish children found refuge from Nazi Germany in the U.K. in 1938.

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