You may know Olivia Newton-John from her role in "Grease," her chart-topping songs, or her
philanthropy.
But you may not know Newton-John's family had fled the Nazis and fought them.
Shortly after her birth, her maternal grandfather even won an award that makes even four Grammys
seem minor-league by comparison.
Olivia Newton-John's maternal grandfather, Max Born, was an accomplished physicist and
close personal friend of Albert Einstein.
He conceived the name "quantum mechanics," helped to rename the Institute of Theoretical
Physics in Gottingen in the 1920s, and he was Jewish.
As a Jewish family in Germany on the cusp of the rise of the Nazi regime, the happiness
of Born and his wife and children — including Newton-John's mother Irene — was short-lived.
In his memoirs, Born recalled the situation in Germany going from bad to worse as anti-semitism
became the norm.
In one instance, he received a phone call in the middle of the night, with the caller
shouting and singing a Nazi hymn.
In another, he recalled the tragedy of a friend taking his own life because
"he saw no hope for Germany and Europe."
Even as Adolf Hitler came to power, Born began plotting his escape.
By May of 1933, Born had been stripped of his position at the university, and his family
was forced to flee Germany.
He later wrote in his memoirs:
"All I had built up in Gottingen, during twelve years' hard work, was shattered.
It seemed to me like the end of the world."
Born accepted an invitation to go to Cambridge, where he had previously spent two terms while
studying for his doctorate.
According to his son Gustav, writing for the University of Gottingen, these years were
instrumental in the family's decision to move to Cambridge when they were driven from their
homes.
He wrote:
"It determined our family becoming British instead of French, Russian, American, or Turkish,
all through offers of jobs he received from these countries."
Born didn't return to Germany until 1954, by which time he had already contributed considerable
further work in quantum mechanics, solid state physics, and optics.
That same year, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics
"for his fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially for his statistical interpretation
of the wavefunction."
According to Olivia Newton-John's autobiography, "Don't Stop Believin'," Max Born's eldest
daughter, Irene, fell in love at Cambridge, when she was transfixed by the sound of a
man singing.
Newton-John later wrote:
"She actually followed the voice.
Mum always said she fell in love with the voice before she even saw him."
The "him" was Olivia's father, Brinley "Brin" Newton-John, who was a student at Cambridge
at the time.
Like many members of Olivia's musically gifted family — her grandfather Max Born was also
an accomplished pianist — Brin was already an accomplished singer when he met his first
wife.
Olivia Newton-John's parents were married in 1937, and Brin Newton-John was commissioned
into the Royal Air Force by 1940 — keeping him away from home much of the time, including
for the births of Olivia's two older siblings.
Brin Newton-John was ultimately drafted into the British intelligence services.
Due to his fluency in German, he was assigned to the task of interrogating captured German
soldiers — most often, downed fighter pilots.
His knowledge of upper-class German society helped him gain their confidence.
As he later recounted in an interview on NBN Television, his tactics weren't torture or
bullying, but being friendly.
He recalled:
"If we got them to talk, we got them to talk by being nice to them, on the whole, rather
than by being bullies.
I don't think I'd have made a very good bully, in any case."
Olivia Newton-John recalled some of the stories in her autobiography, where she also talked
about an afternoon tea with Nazi leader Rudolf Hess.
She wrote:
"Dad would wine and dine infamous prisoners, generally the high-ranking officials in the
Third Reich, in order to pry information out of them."
As World War II began, Rudolf Hess was Adolf Hitler's right hand.
Following the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, he was so dedicated to the cause that he voluntarily
joined Hitler in prison, where he was responsible for copying down most of Hitler's "Mein Kampf."
By 1933, Hess was deputy party leader of the Nazi Party, but by 1941, his position of influence
had begun to wane.
So it was then that he cooked up a plan that was equal parts desperate and bizarre.
It began with him heading deep into Allied territory, embarking on an unsanctioned solo
flight from Germany to Scotland in an attempt to broker a peace deal with the United Kingdom.
Years later, fellow Nazi Albert Speer discussed Hess' plan with him while the two served their
sentences in Spandau prison.
Quoted in the Smithsonian Magazine, Speer recalled that,
"Hess assured me in all seriousness that the idea had been inspired in him in a dream by
supernatural forces.
We will guarantee England her Empire; in return she will give us a free hand in Europe."
Unfortunately for Hess, his mission didn't exactly go off as planned.
Out of fuel, he was forced to bail out of his plane near a farm in Scotland.
He was eventually picked up by British soldiers, among them Brinley Newton-John, who helped
to verify Hess' identity.
Though he brought his message of peace to the British authorities, they regarded it
as having no validity, and he was held as a prisoner of war.
Victory over Germany during World War II relied on one very important task — breaking the
Nazi Enigma codes, in which all top-secret German communications were encrypted.
These codes used a complex electrical device, known as an Enigma machine, that was thought
to be unbreakable.
Brinley Newton-John was part of the top-secret team that worked for months to prove them
wrong.
The team worked alongside Alan Turing and others as part of the Ultra project at Bletchley
Park, which eventually gave rise to the first modern computer.
Interestingly, Newton-John's placement in the project had just as much to do with his
musical talents as his fluency in German.
His musical notation fluency gave him an ordered mind that was perfect for sifting through
code, and his contributions helped change the war.
Years later, Newton-John would call his work with Ultra the "most significant" contribution
he made to the war effort.
At the same time, though, the years of secrecy still made him hesitant to speak of it.
"Still, one still has that feeling that one's going to be shot if one talks about it, you
know?
I feel very uncomfortable about it, actually."
Popularly known as the "Desert Fox," Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was considered one of
the greatest military geniuses in Germany, and for months he had kept Allied forces in
a stalemate in the Western Desert theater of North Africa.
It was not until October 23, 1942, that British forces won a decisive victory against Rommel,
cutting off Axis forces from the Suez Canal and the oil fields of the Middle East.
While won with tanks, soldiers, and strategy, this victory might not have been possible
without the intelligence provided by operatives like Brinley Newton-John working at Bletchley
Park, who passed along information about German troop movements and supply lines to Allied
forces prior to their strategic victory.
Stationed in what was known as Hut 3, where the intelligence decoded in Hut 6 was interpreted
and analyzed, Newton-John was part of a team that had been gathering, decoding, and analyzing
data for weeks leading up to the decisive battle.
It was this intelligence that helped to turn the tide against the infamous German tactician.
After World War II finally drew to a close in 1945, Brinley Newton-John had attained
the rank of war substantive flight lieutenant.
Not interested in pursuing a further career in the armed forces, he instead resumed the
one that the war had interrupted, working as headmaster of the Cambridgeshire High School
for Boys until 1954.
He then moved his family from Cambridge and the UK to Australia, in order to take a position
as master of Ormond College at the University of Melbourne.
Olivia Newton-John was just 6 years old at the time, and unfortunately, his marriage
to Irene Born could not survive the rigors of both the war and the move to Australia.
Within just a few short years it had broken up, leaving Irene to raise Olivia as a single
mother.
Over the next few decades, Brin carved out an impressive career in academia, and by the
time of his 1980 interview with Ron Hurst, he had served as deputy vice-chancellor at
the University of Newcastle.
Following the breakup of his first marriage, Brinley Newton-John married twice more in
the course of his life, and was the father of a son and daughter with his second wife,
in addition to Olivia and her two siblings.
Olivia Newton-John was being interviewed for a piece in The Times when she revealed some
heartbreaking details of one of the most difficult times in her life.
At the same time she received confirmation of her own diagnosis of breast cancer, her
father was dying of liver cancer.
Even as she was getting the results and hearing the news about her father, she was preparing
to embark on a world tour.
Brinley Newton-John died in 1992 at the age of 78, and years later, this experience helped
motivate his daughter to open the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Wellness & Research Centre.
The facility is not only involved in research, clinical trials, and patient treatment, but
also in additional programs designed to treat the mind and soul as well as the body, such
as art and music therapy.
"I believe, and I dream, that we will see an end to cancer in my lifetime."
She wrote in her autobiography:
"It had snuck up on him and the entire family.
One day, he was reading the paper and sipping his coffee, and the next day [...] barely
able to speak.
[...] In my heart, I knew I would never see my father again — and I was right."
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