It remained on the Eastern Front, mainly under Army Group Center, until it was trapped on the coast at Courland in the summer of 1944.

[1][2] Würzburg had previously been the garrison town for the 2nd Panzer Division which had moved its headquarters to Vienna after the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938.

One of its passengers was brutally interrogated, tortured (German soldiers cut off his nose, ears and tongue) and then executed by personnel of the 4th Division.

The following day, the division was reinforced with artillery and the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler motorized infantry regiment, and began another assault towards Ochota and Wola.

After the failed assault on Warsaw, 4th Panzer Division was withdrawn westward and took part in the Battle of the Bzura, where it supported a German counter-attack.

After a blitzkrieg assault through Liège and Charleroi, it reached the area of Bethune, where it fought against the British Expeditionary Force in what became known as the battle of Dunkirk.

[citation needed] The division was moved to East Prussia and then to the area of Brześć Litewski in occupied Poland, where it was assigned to the XXIV Panzer Corps under Geyr von Schweppenburg.

The division then spearheaded one of the pincer moves to surround and destroy a large Soviet force in the battle of Minsk, where the German army took approximately 300,000 prisoners.

The assault started on 30 September 1941, the division captured Orel in early October but was ambushed on the road to Mtsensk by 1st Guards Rifle Corps on the 6th of that month.

Warm clothing and white camouflage suits were lacking, and tanks and other vehicles were immobilized as temperatures dropped below freezing.

[citation needed] On 5 December, the division was withdrawn and ordered to defend a stretch of front near Moscow against a Soviet winter counter-offensive.

[citation needed] It withdrew to the Orel area, where the thaw halted the Soviet counter-offensive and the unit could be partially reinforced.

Assigned to the XXXIX Panzer Corps under Gen. Karl Decker, the division withdrew to the area of Warsaw, where the Soviet advance ran out of momentum at the end of July.

Some of its sub-units were cut off from the rest of German-held territory, along with the 16th and 18th Armies, in Livonia on the Courland Peninsula, where they supported the defense until the end of the war.