Someone claimed in The Canberra Times that the Olympic Torch relay was a ritual invented by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. There is no evidence that Goebbels was behind the introduction of the Olympic torch relay.
Historical records indicate that Dr Carl Diem, General Secretary of the German Olympic Organising Committee, was its originator. Originally, Diem had planned for the 1916 Summer Olympics to be staged in Berlin, but World War I had intervened.
Diem's relationship to the Nazi party is unclear: in 1934, the Nazis even had classified him as "politically unreliable", possibly because of his wife's Jewish relatives. He was never a member of the Nazi party.
In 1968, on the occasion of the Mexico City Summer Olympics, the West-German postal department (Deutsche Bundespost) issued a stamp bearing his portrait.
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