As we can tell from below, this story already made the rounds online last October, so I’m probably just kicking at an open door here. Nevertheless, I haven’t seen anybody on this website mention it, so I have decided to create a topic for it anyway. This article by Snopes is simply the best summary that I found on the subject.

Here are a couple more examples:

The [Fascists] embraced sports as a tool both to boost Germany’s public profile and to train its future armies of young men, so the pioneering shoe company fit nicely into their schema. Under [Fascism], the Dasslers’ sneaker sales promptly exploded, and they grew the size of their company several times over.

(Source.)

From these scrappy roots, they had their first big success at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. U.S. sprinter Jesse Owens agreed to run in their spiked athletic shoe and famously went on to win four gold medals, putting the Dassler brothers’ shoes, then known as Geda, on the map. Altogether, the athletes who competed in Geda shoes at the controversial games captured seven gold medals, five silver medals, and five bronze medals. Suddenly coaches and their athletes were aware of the company, and Adi and Rudi were selling 200,000 pairs of shoes every year in the years leading up to World War II.

(Source.)