More than 70 years on, the summer Olympics of 1936 are popularly remembered for the exploits of the American track star Jesse Owens, and for the legend of Adolf Hitler’s refusal to shake Owens’s hand, which probably never happened. The best-known images of those long-ago German games are still those captured by Leni Riefenstahl in her epic documentary “Olympia,” which, while produced with lavish funding from Joseph Goebbels’s Nazi Propaganda Ministry, remains the most influential sports film ever made.

But another legacy of those games is less often traced to Hitler’s Berlin: The great symbol at the heart of the modern Olympics — that of a series of torch-bearing runners carrying the inspirational flame cross country to the stadium for the lighting ceremony — was an “invented tradition” of the Nazis in 1936. The torch relay was devised to draw the link Hitler saw between the Olympiad’s classical origins and its modern rebirth in the Aryan ideal.