The Nazi Origins of the Olympic Torch Relay

German athlete Fritz Schilgen runs past German army soldiers with the Olympic torch on his way to lighting the Olympic flame at the opening ceremony of the 1936 Summer Olympics at the Olympiastadion in Berlin, Germany, on Aug. 1 1936.

The lighting of the Olympic cauldron on July 26 will mark the start of the Games and the end of a two-and-a-half-month torch relay designed to inspire enthusiasm across France for the games.

Beginning in Ancient Olympia, Greece, on April 16 as a tribute to the original version of the Games, the torch arrived in Marseilles, France, three weeks later by way of a three-masted ship. By the time its journey concludes, approximately 10,000 torchbearers—including Ukrainian gymnast Mariia Vysochanska, former NBA star Tony Parker, and Michelin-starred chef Alexandre Mazzia— will have carried it to 64 French territories, visiting historical sites like the landing beaches in Normandy and the Palace of Versailles.

However, this bright spot in the countdown to the Olympics has a dark history. It dates back to the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, at a time when dictator Adolf Hitler was trying to improve the image of Nazi Germany. At the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics and the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, flames were lit to mark the beginning of the Games and extinguished to signal the end of the Games. But the first torch relay was the brainchild of Carl Diem, the organizer of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Diem, who later became a prominent Nazi official, saw the torch relay as a way to connect the games to the ancient world and, by extension, to the Nazi ideology of racial purity. That year the torch was transported to seven countries over 12 days. When it arrived at the Olympiastadion in Berlin, Hitler himself declared that the Games had officially begun, according to the book Total Olympics by Jeremy Fuchs.

Adolf Hitler during the Berlin Summer Olympics in 1936.

Hitler was a devout reader of Greek mythology and drawn to the torch as a symbol of ancient Greece. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Nazis compared themselves to the ancient Greeks, and a Nazi myth argued that “a superior German civilization was the rightful heir of an ‘Aryan’ culture of classical antiquity.” Hitler wanted to use the torch as a propaganda symbol, akin to the torchlit parades and rallies that the party regularly hosted to indoctrinate children and adults to the Nazi movement.

At this point, the torch relay has been completely disassociated from its Nazi past, but it has occasionally sparked controversy over the years. For example, during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the torch relay became a target of anti-China and pro-Tibet protests. Taiwan also didn’t want to be included in the relay because it wanted to assert its self-governance, the Associated Press reported.
For the most part, however, the torch relay today is seen as a way to celebrate each host country’s claims to fame as the flame is transported to different landmarks. As Tony Perrottet wrote in his 2004 book The Naked Olympics, the torch is seen as a “symbol of international brotherhood.”