The first torch relay took place during the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Originally conceived for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the torch relay ceremony was used as a propaganda tool for the Nazi regime. In July 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Olympic flame did not make its traditional relay route through numerous countries in order to light the cauldron in Tokyo, Japan, for the start of the games. Normally the flame is transferred from one torch to another in a relay across nations, but in March 2020, starting in Olympia, Greece, the flame was flown directly to Japan where it waited as organizers scrambled to reschedule the postponed games due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But where did this tradition originate from? The Olympics torch relay has a dark history, with its roots in Nazi propaganda. The torch relay was conceived for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, under Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. While the opportunity to host the Olympics was awarded to Germany in 1931, Hitler came into power soon after, inheriting the hosting duties from the Weimar Republic.
Joseph Goebbels, in charge of Nazi propaganda, recognized the benefits of hosting the games, by celebrating the “Aryan” ideal and presenting Germany’s image to the world. During the period leading up to and during the games, athletic imagery established links between Nazi Germany and ancient Greece, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Some of those posters can be seen on the website of the Holocaust Memorial Museum. The images depicted Aryan figures imagined as heroic, blue-eyed blondes. One even depicted such a figure running on a map, tracing the torch relay route from Greece to Germany. There is plenty of reporting on how Hitler admired Greek civilization and wished to recreate it to represent the aspirations of the Third Reich. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
via snopes: Was the Olympics Torch Relay a Tool of Nazi Propaganda?
siehe auch: THE NAZI OLYMPICS BERLIN 1936: INAUGURATION OF THE OLYMPIC TORCH RELAY. (…) On August 1, 1936, Hitler opened the Games of the 11th Olympiad. Musical fanfares directed by the famous composer Richard Strauss announced the dictator’s arrival to the largely German crowd. Hundreds of athletes in opening day regalia marched into the stadium, team by team in alphabetical order. Inaugurating a new Olympic ritual, a lone runner arrived bearing a torch carried by relay from the site of the ancient Games in Olympia, Greece. The Torch Relay. The 1936 Games were the first to employ the torch run. Each of 3,422 torch bearers ran one kilometer (0.6 miles) along the route of the torch relay from the site of the ancient Olympics in Olympia, Greece, to Berlin. Former German Olympian Carl Diem modeled the relay after one that had been run in Athens in 80 B.C. It perfectly suited Nazi propagandists, who used torchlit parades and rallies to attract Germans, especially youth, to the Nazi movement.
Von Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1976-116-08A / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, Link