The 4th Armored Division landed at Utah Beach on July 13, 1944, a month after the D-Day invasion (June 6, 1944) of the French Normandy coast. Within weeks, the "Breakthrough" division was sweeping across France. During the Battle of the Bulge, the unit provided badly needed support to the encircled U.S. forces in Bastogne, Belgium. In late March 1945, the 4th crossed the Rhine River into central Germany and, by war's end, had reached the Czech border.

On April 4, 1945, the "Breakthrough" division overran Ohrdruf, a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp and the first Nazi camp liberated by U.S. troops. Created in November 1944 near the town of Gotha, Ohrdruf supplied forced labor in the form of concentration camp prisoners for railway construction leading to a proposed communications center, which was never completed because of the rapid U.S. advance. In late March 1945, the camp had a prisoner population of some 11,700, but in early April almost all the prisoners were evacuated on death marches to Buchenwald. The SS guards killed many of the remaining prisoners who were too ill to walk to the railway cars.