Photo Gallery: Moments in Olympics History

Although the Olympic flame was first instituted at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, the 1936 games in Nazi Germany marked the debut of the torch relay. Here, the final relay runner approaches the Olympic flame at the swastika-festooned Lustgarten in Berlin.

Many nations threatened to boycott the 1936 Olympics, protesting the policies of the three-year-old Nazi regime. To quell the movement to boycott, the International Olympic Committee extracted assurances from Adolf Hitler that he would not use the games to promote Nazi ideology, a promise he clearly ignored.

The biggest story of the Berlin Olympics was American track-and-field star Jesse Owens. The world cheered as Owens won four gold medals (three individual and one team) in a slap to Hitler and his Aryan ideals. The next two Olympic Games would be cancelled due to World War II.