The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Hitler, the Nobel Prize and ‘Grease’

Posted on | April 7, 2025 | 16 Comments

Truth is stranger than fiction, it is proverbially said, and such is the course of history that events and people can be connected in ways that you never imagined. Certainly I never dreamed that the hit musical Grease could be connected to a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and a World War II military intelligence officer, until yesterday I fell down one of those research rabbit-holes into which I’m so prone to stumble.

In 1933, the Nazis came to power in Germany, and Jews were purged from German universities. Among the victims of this purge was a physics professor at the University of Göttingen whose students had included a young fellow named Robert Oppenheimer — maybe you’ve heard of him. Among the professor’s assistants at Göttingen were such important physicists as Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller. The professor had been recommended for the 1928 Nobel Prize by Albert Einstein, but instead the honor went to one of his colleagues. When Hitler came to power and the professor was purged from the university, he emigrated to England, teaching first at Cambridge University before eventually taking a faculty position at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

Max Born

After relocating to the United Kingdom, Professor Max Born published Atomic Physics, which quickly became the standard textbook in the field. He retired at age 70 in 1952, and two years later — through the efforts of his peers and former students including Fermi — Max Born was finally awarded the Nobel Prize for his “fundamental research in Quantum Mechanics.” In retirement, he returned to his native Germany, where he died at age 87 in 1970. But that’s just half the story . . .

In 1935, the son of a school teacher from Cardiff, Wales, got his bachelor’s degree from Cambridge University, with honors in German and French. The young scholar’s name was Brinley, and his fluency in German soon made him very valuable to his country. When World War II broke out in 1939, Brinley joined the Royal Air Force, and was assigned to military intelligence (MI5). Among his duties was gathering information from captured German prisoners. He reportedly worked on the top-secret “Enigma” decryption project and was the officer who took Nazi henchman Rudolf Hess into custody. After the war, Brinley taught high school in Cambridge until 1954, when he moved to Australia, becoming a university dean and later a host of radio and TV programs.

Brinley Newton-John

Well, I said his name was Brinley, but I didn’t tell you that his surname was Newton-John, because that would have spoiled the surprise. You see, in 1937, Brinley “Brin” Newton-John married a girl named Irene Born, whom he had met when her father Max Born was teaching at Cambridge. In 1948, Brinley and Irene’s youngest daughter Olivia was born.

Irene Born and Brinley Newton-John, circa 1935

In her autobiography, Olivia Newton-John wrote:

“My parents might have never met at Cambridge University if my mum didn’t have such a keen ear for beautiful music. . . . One day, she heard a man singing in a deep baritone voice and she couldn’t take another step. She actually followed the voice. Mum always said she fell in love with the voice before she ever saw him. . . . Mum was brunette, classically beautiful , and carried herself in a most elegant way. Dad was six-foot-three, fair-haired, with movie-star good looks and that beautiful aristocratic voice. Need I say more? What a beautiful couple.”

Until I stumbled down this rabbit hole, I never would have guessed that Olivia Newton-John was half-Jewish, much less that her maternal grandfather was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. That her father was MI5 during World War II and played a role in capturing Rudolf Hess — well, this is the whipped cream and cherry on the top.

Olivia Newton-John as Sandy in ‘Grease.’

So how did I end up down this rabbit hole? Blame the dadgum YouTube algorithm. Lying down for a Sunday afternoon nap, I was watching police videos — my usual bedtime habit — and was scrolling through when I saw a short video about Olivia Newton-John and clicked on it. The soundtrack of the clip was “Let Me Be There,” her 1973 top 10 hit that earned her a country music Grammy award. What I loved most about that song was the bass vocal harmony, and after watching that short video, I wanted to find out who had sang that part, so I did a Google search for the answer (Mike Sammes), but in checking Olivia Newton-John’s Wikipedia biography, I was startled to learn about her grandfather.

Wait, did I say “startled”? What I meant to say was, I got chills, they’re multiplying, and I’m losing control . . .

 



 

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Category: History, Movies, Music

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