Since the late 1970s, attempts have been made to place the Allied bombings of German cities in a more nuanced historical context in both East and West Germany. Unlike the situation prevailing in the 1950s and 1960s, the air war was now researched by professional German historians. In West Germany, Dresden im Luftkrieg appeared in 1977. This book by Gotz Bergander (1927- 2013), a Dresden native living in the Federal Republic, can be regarded as the first critical study of the bombing of Dresden, in which many conclusions that had been drawn in previous studies of Rodenberger, Rumpf, and Irving were unmasked as popular, unfounded myths.

Apart from this study and a few other thoroughly researched local histories, the development of a West German professional historiography on the Allied strategic bombing campaign has for a large part been the responsibility of Horst Boog (1928). Boog is a military historian who worked at the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, the West German army's institute of military history in Freiburg. After finishing a comprehensive study on the strategic and organizational structure of the Luftwaffe leadership during the Second World War in 1982, Boog became an internationally renowned specialist on the air war and the Allied bombings, who conducted intensive archival research and participated in international academic debates.

Though Boog's work did not result in a monograph on the air war, he delivered several lengthy contributions to the multivolume overview Germany and the Second World War (Das Deutsche Reich im Zweiten Weltkrieg; from now on DRZW) in 1983, 1990, 2001, and 2008. Taken together these can be regarded as a comprehensive history of the German and Anglo-American air war and bombing campaigns. Apart from his work for this series, since the late 1970s, Boog has produced numerous academic and popular articles for journals and volumes. With this, Boog became arguably the most important West German expert on the air war and strategic bombing during the Second World War.

Together with Bergander and a few others like Klaus Maier, Horst Boog was responsible for the emergence of an academic historiography on the Allied bombings in Germany.