Answer:
In the summer of 1923, Adolf Hitler realized he had a problem. Germany was in the midst of an extreme economic crisis that inspired widespread feelings of disaffection, worries about national and personal decline, a wave of anti-globalism, and the political turmoil that the 34-year-old Nazi leader had been longing for.
But for Hitler, this air of imminent national revolution had come too soon—because no one yet realized that he should be Germany’s natural leaderBut publishing such a self-aggrandizing portrait would have repelled Germany’s traditional conservatives, so Hitler searched for a writer with impeccable conservative credentials willing to pretend to have written the book. Doing so would come with a double payoff: Hitler’s shameless act of self-promotion would be concealed, while the impression would be created that he already was in receipt of widespread support among traditional conservatives.
This led Hitler to Victor von Koerber, a blue-eyed and blond young military hero and writer. A North-German aristocrat, von Koerber was attracted by the promise of a new conservatism fused with the youthful idealism of National Socialism.
The book—published under the title Adolf Hitler, sein Leben, seine Reden (Adolf Hitler: His Life and His Speeches)—was banned soon after publication, limiting its intended impact. Yet the book sheds light on how Hitler—in a moment rife for demagoguery—managed to rise to the top against all odds.
Hitler often paid lip service to the myth—which tends to be believed by historians to the present day—that he was only “a drummer” who was doing the bidding of others and had no ambitions to lead Germany into the future. But in the book, he put into the mouth of Koerber his own determination that he was “the leader of the most radically honest national movement […] who is ready as well as prepared to lead the German struggle for liberation.”
Hiding behind Koerber’s name, Hitler could get away with pronouncing himself Germany’s “messiah.” His autobiography-in-disguise repeatedly uses biblical language, arguing that the book should “become the new bible of today as well as the ‘Book of the German People.’” It also directly compares Hitler to Jesus, likening the purported moment of his politicization in Pasewalk to Jesus’s resurrection:
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