How is the onetime German fuhrer connected to the Chinese furor?
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Though protesters may want to extinguish the Olympic flame because they believe it has no business ending up in a country that violates human rights, the torch itself started its journey in the most egregious destroyer of humanity itself, the Third Reich.
There was no eternal flame in the ancient Olympics. (Torches were used in other Greek festivals.) In fact, there was no torch at the first modern Games in Athens in 1896. The notion of using a flame began in 1928 at the Amsterdam Olympics. But the practice of not extinguishing it and passing it from country to country in a cross- continent and cross- time relay was Carl Diem’s, Hitler’s appointee to design the Berlin festivities. Manufacturer Krupp was enlisted to craft the torch, propagandist Leni Riefenstahl to document its transfer from runner to runner and publicity chief Josef Goebbels to create the attendant media circus.
The intention of the torch relay was not to spread the idea of the nobility of man and sport but of the supremacy of Germany and the master race. The apparent parallels of German perfection and Greek ideal manifested in the figure of the aryan athlete in full gallop was not lost on the Nazis.
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