Adolph Kiefer, a celebrated swimming champion who won gold as a teenager at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and might well have become one of America’s greatest Olympic champions if World War II had not intervened, died on Friday at his home in Wadsworth, Ill. He was 98.

The United States Olympic Committee reported his death on its Team USA website, describing him as the oldest living United States Olympic champion.

If the war denied Kiefer a chance for more Olympic gold — the 1940 and 1944 Games were canceled because of World War II — it nevertheless gave him, in his view, his greatest satisfaction. As a naval officer, appalled at the number of drowning deaths among American casualties, he helped improve swimming and lifesaving instruction for the Navy.

His triumph in Berlin seemed to presage a dominant Olympic career. As Kiefer took the gold, Albion Ross, who was in Berlin covering the Games for The New York Times, wrote, “No one who saw today’s race could honestly deny that he had witnessed the greatest back-stroker that has ever swum.”

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And Kiefer continued to improve, reaching his peak about a decade later, when he was in his 20s. In an NPR program about Kiefer in 2008, the sportswriter Frank DeFord said that if the war had not interrupted his career, “he’d be to the backstroke what Pablo Casals was to the cello.”

Tall and good-looking, Kiefer was courted by Hollywood and drew comparisons to matinee idols. “He is a Van Johnson in pastel drawers, the greatest backstroke swimmer who ever lived,” the sports columnist Red Smith wrote.

Kiefer went into business instead, and thrived.

Sonny Boy Kiefer, as he was widely known, broke his first world record at the age of 15, and for 15 years he held every world backstroke mark. He was the first man to swim the 100-yard backstroke in less than one minute, according to the International Swimming Hall of Fame, which inducted him in 1965.

He also set world records in the individual medley, and from 1935 through 1945, when he retired from swimming, he won 58 national championships in backstroke, individual medley and freestyle. From 1934 through 1943, he won more than 200 consecutive backstroke races.

He broke 23 records in all, including every national and world backstroke record, according to Team USA.

Kiefer was 15 when he met the captain of the University of Michigan swimming team, Tex Robertson, who agreed to coach him. For the next three years Kiefer hitchhiked from his home in Chicago to Ann Arbor to train with Robertson.

During practice at the Michigan pool in 1936, Kiefer bettered the American record for the 100-yard backstroke. Matt Mann, the Michigan coach, challenged him to do it again. He did, and Mann insisted that he try out for the 1936 Olympic team. Kiefer did, and won a place on it at 17.

In Berlin, Adolf Hitler sought to exploit the Games as a showcase of Aryan athletic superiority — a plan that would be undermined by the success of the African-American sprinter and long-jumper Jesse Owens.

Kiefer broke the Olympic record for the 100-meter backstroke in the trials and semifinals and went on to set a world record of 1 minute 5.9 seconds in the final, winning the gold medal. He was 18.

“He did it with the ease and nonchalance that are the rare privilege of only the greatest athletes,” Mr. Ross wrote.

Kiefer went on to college — actually three universities: Texas, Columbia and Northwestern — but did not earn a degree. He entered the Navy in 1942 as a specialist in the physical fitness and swimming division.

He soon found that the Navy was losing more lives to drowning than to gunfire. With his superiors’ approval, he set about running swimming and lifesaving instruction for the entire Navy. He called it his “greatest thrill.”

“No one could get on a ship without taking a 21-hour course in swimming,” Kiefer said. “We designed lifesaving equipment and taught them what we called the victory backstroke” — which began with the arms extended over the head forming a V.

Adolph Gustav Kiefer was born on June 27, 1918, in Chicago, the fourth of seven children of German-born parents, who called him Sonny. His father was a candy maker.

By Kiefer’s account, his swimming life began with a near-drowning. Falling by accident into an ice-cold Chicago drainage canal as a child, and not knowing how to swim, he instinctively rolled onto his back and began kicking his feet furiously until he reached dry ground. He promptly took swimming lessons at a Y.M.C.A. and became devoted to the sport, swimming in Lake Michigan and entering competitions as a student at Roosevelt High School that would carry him to the Olympics.

After the war, Hollywood producers wanted Kiefer to try the movies, in one case offering him the role of Tarzan. Bob Kiphuth, the celebrated coach at Yale, wanted him to become an assistant. But Kiefer turned them all down and began manufacturing swimming pool and lifesaving equipment under the name Adolph Kiefer and Associates.

The business later became the Kiefer Sports Group, based in Zion, Ill., building swimming pools, pool equipment and safety devices. His company credits him with introducing the first commercial line of plastic kickboards and developing the nylon swimming suit, among other innovations. Kiefer owned more than a dozen patents for swimming gear and invented a flip turn for the backstroke that is still used. He sold the business in 2011 to a private investment firm.

Kiefer was a fitness advocate who traveled the nation encouraging businesses to sponsor fitness programs for their employees.

“I sometimes believe industry stamps a man physically fit if his handshake is firm, his head steady enough to do battle with a three-martini lunch, and his bottom hard enough to sit long hours behind a desk,” the swimming hall of fame quoted him as saying.

Kiefer’s wife, the former Joyce Kainer, whom he married in 1941, died in 2015. Their four children — Dale, Jack, Kathy and Gail — were competitive swimmers as well, with Dale and Jack earning national rankings at Yale.

Besides his four children, Kiefer is survived by 14 grandchildren; and 16 great-grandchildren.

In later years, Kiefer ran youth swimming programs in Chicago. He and his wife often left their home in Wadsworth, just south of the Wisconsin border, to attend major meets around the world.

They also took scuba-diving trips to explore historic shipwrecks. He continued to swim every day in the small indoor pool at his home, even after he developed a nerve-damage condition, neuropathy, in his legs and hands, which kept him in a wheelchair except for his daily swims. The Team USA website quoted him as saying that the water kept him alive.

Kiefer never tired of talking about the Berlin Olympics, where he befriended Owens, who won four gold medals.

One day, while Kiefer was training, Hitler came by with an entourage of Nazi officials, including the powerful Hermann Göring. Hitler had learned of Kiefer’s German heritage and wanted to meet him.

“I remember him being a small man with a small hand,” Kiefer told the Times columnist Ira Berkow in 2000, “and his handshake wasn’t a firm one. Then he spoke to the interpreter, and I was told he said something like, ‘This young man is the perfect example of the true Aryan.’”

Kiefer added: “At the time, I was honored to meet this important head of state. But if I knew then what I know now about Hitler, I should have thrown him into the pool and drowned him. I even can’t stand the name Adolph now. But I’m stuck with it.”