Further southeast, in the Balkans, firefighters continued to battle wildfires that have been raging across Europe all summer.
In Waldorf, in the southwestern state of Rhineland-Palatinate, a 58-year-old woman was struck by a falling tree and fatally injured, the German news agency DPA reported on Thursday.
Another woman, 47, suffered serious injuries in the accident, police said.
The women were walking together when a storm rolled in and they sought shelter under a covered seating area.
Both women were struck when a tree was uprooted and fell onto the seating area.
A tornado struck the town of Furstenwalde, about 80km southeast of Berlin, tearing off roofs and knocking trees onto cars, with one person injured.
In Hohr-Grenzhausen in the Westerwald district in western Germany, a storm tore walls from buildings, according to DPA, and several trees were uprooted.
A widespread power outage also hit the area, while strong gusts of wind overturned a truck on a highway.
There were also numerous weather-related emergency calls overnight in Hesse, Thuringia and Bavaria, with about 60 houses damaged at Wetzlar in Hesse.
The German Weather Service warned that further severe storms could occur later in the day, particularly in Baden-Wurttemberg and Bavaria in southern Germany.
While the storms in Germany were accompanied by cooler temperatures, high temperatures continued to be recorded in southeastern Europe, and fires raged in some parts of the region.
In Serbia, a Russian firefighting plane joined efforts in Serbia on Thursday to fight wildfires that devastated a nature reserve in the northeast as the Balkan country faces a fresh heatwave in the coming days.
The fire in Deliblatska Pescara, or Deliblato Sands, first erupted a month ago, but was under control until early August when it started spreading swiftly, engulfing thousands of acres of pine forests and shrubbery.
Several other big fires also have been raging in other parts of the country, as well as throughout the region in the past weeks.
An extremely hot and dry summer has fuelled wildfires throughout Europe, from Belgium to Greece.
Croatian firefighters from the popular tourism hot spot of Dubrovnik on Thursday joined a struggle to contain a fire across the border in Bosnia to prevent it spreading towards the medieval walled city that is a protected heritage site.
"It was a hard night," regional firefighting unit commander Stjepan Simović told the Hina news agency.
"The fire is huge and in an inaccessible terrain, so we have to be vigilant."
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