"Angel of Death"
In 1931 Mengele joined the Steel Helmuts (Stahlhelm). In October 1934 he left the Steel Helmuts because of his kidney trouble. A year later Mengele was awarded his Ph.D. from the University of Munich. On January 1, 1937 he was appointed as a research assistant at the Third Reich Institute for Heredity, Biology, and Radical purity at the University of Frankfurt. In May, 1937, Mengele joined the Nazi Party, and a year later admitted to the SS. During July he was awarded his medical degree by the University of Frankfurt. Soon after, in October, he began basic training with the Wehrmacht, which lasted three months. In July of 1939 Mengele married Irene Schoenbein. A year later he joined the medical corps of the Waffen SS. In June 1941 he was sent to the Ukraine as part of the Waffen SS, and received the Iron Cross, Second Class. In January 1942 Mengele joined the Waffen SS's Viking Division medical corps. He earned the Iron Cross, First Class, by pulling two soldiers out of a burning tank while under enemy fire. He also was awarded the Black Badge for the Wounded and the Medal for the Care of the German People. After that he was pronounced unfit for duty, so he volunteered to go to a concentration camp.
On May 30, 1942 Mengele arrived at Auschwitz. While there he conducted medical experiments on twins, dwarfs, giants, and many others. Day after day he helped with the selection process of the new arrivals. One day he selected over 400,000 Women to go to the gas chamber. On March 11, 1944 his son, Rolf, was born. Sometime in the middle of January 1945 he fled Auschwitz.
Mengele was on the run. He arrived at Gross-Rosen camp, and then left before the Russians liberated it on February 11, 1945. He was later spotted at Mauthausen. Mengele was captured as a prisoner of war and held in a POW camp near Munich. He received papers from a fellow prisoner, Dr. Fritz Ulmann. Mengele, for vanity reasons, hadn't gotten his blood type tattooed beneath his arm . The American Army did not realize he was a member of the SS and released him. Mengele settled at George Fischer's farm for three years. He escaped to Argentina in 1949. In 1954 his father came to visit him in Argentina. He divorced Irene the same year. Two years later he officially had his name changed to Josef Mengele. In 1958 Mengele married his brother, Karl's, widow, Martha Mengele. On June 7, 1959 West Germany issued its first arrest warrant for Mengele. He then moved to Paraguay. In 1964 the Universities of Frankfurt and Munich withdrew his academic degrees. He was believed to have died on February 7, 1979 on the beach at Bertiogain Embu, Brazil while suffering a stroke while swimming in the ocean. In June 1985, the body in the grave was exhumed for forensic identification, because the body was buried in a grave named Wolfgang Gerhard.