Gottfried Feder was an anti-capitalist, anti-Semite and one of the early key members of the German Nazi
party. He was their economic theoretician. Initially, it was his
lecture in 1919 that drew Hitler into the party. (1)
Feder was born in Würzburg, Germany on January 27, 1883, as the son of civil servant Hans Feder and Mathilde
Feder (née Luz). After attending humanistic schools in Ansbach
and Munich, he studied engineering in Berlin and Zürich (Switzerland); after graduating, he founded a construction
company in 1908 that subsequently was particularly active in Bulgaria
where it built a number of official buildings.
From 1917 on, Feder studied financial politics and
economics on his own; he developed a hostility towards wealthy bankers
during World War I and wrote a "manifesto on breaking the shackles
of interest" ("Brechung der Zinsknechtschaft")
in 1919. This was soon followed by the founding of a "task force"
dedicated to those goals that demanded a nationalisation of all banks
and an abolishment of interest.
In the same year, Feder, together with Anton
Drexler, Dietrich Eckart and Karl Harrer, was also involved in the founding of the Deutsche
Arbeiterpartei ("German worker's party", DAP), which would
quickly change its name to Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei
(NSDAP). In February 1920,
together with Adolf Hitler and Anton Drexler,
Feder - who also was a member of the Thule Society - drafted the so-called
"25 points," which summed up the party's views, and also introduced
his own anti-capitalist views into the programme. When the paper was
announced on February 24, 1920, more than 2,000 people attended the
rally.
Feder took part in the party's Beer
Hall Putsch in 1923; after Hitler's arrest, he remained one of the leaders of the party and was elected
to the Reichstag in 1924, in which he stayed until 1936 and where he demanded freezing of interest rates and dispossession of
Jewish citizens. He remained one of the leaders of the anti-capitalistic
wing of the NSDAP, and published
several papers, including "National and social bases of the German
state" (1920), "Das Programm der NSDAP und seine weltanschaulichen
Grundlagen" ("The programme of the NSDAP and the world views it's based on", 1927) and "Was will
Adolf Hitler?" ("What does Adolf Hitler want?", 1931).
Hitler's mentor in finance and economics, Feder briefly dominated the NSDAP's official views on financial politics, but after he became chairman of
the party's economic counsil in 1931,
his anti-capitalist views led to a great decline in financial support
from Germany's major industrialists. Following pressure from Walther
Funk, Albert Voegler, Gustav
Krupp, Friedrich Flick, Fritz Thyssen, Hjalmar
Schacht and Emile Kirdorf, Hitler decided to move the party away from Feder's economic views; when he
became Reichskanzler in 1933,
he appointed Feder as under-secretary at the ministry of economics in
July, disappointing Feder who had hoped for a much higher position.
Feder continued to write papers, putting out "Kampf
gegen die Hochfinanz" ("The Fight against high finance",
1933) and the anti-Semitic "Die Juden" ("The Jews",
1933); in 1934,
he became Reichskommissar (Reich commissioner) for settlement.
After the Night
of the Long Knives, where officials like Gregor
Strasser and Ernst Röhm were murdered, Feder began to withdraw from the government, finally
becoming a professor at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin in December
1936, where he stayed until his death in Murnau on September 24, 1941.
1Munich 1923, John
Dornberg, Harper & Row, NY, 1982. pg. 344.