Gottfried Feder

Gottfried Feder (27 January 1883 – 24 September 1941) was a German civil engineer, a self-taught economist, and one of the early key members of the Nazi Party and its economic theoretician. One of his lectures, delivered on 12 September 1919, drew Adolf Hitler into the party.

Feder was born in Würzburg on 27 January 1883, the son of civil servant Hans Feder and Mathilde Feder (née Luz). After being taught in a humanistic gymnasium in Würzburg, he studied engineering in Berlin and Zürich. He founded a construction company in 1908 that became particularly active in Bulgaria where it built a number of official buildings.

Feder claimed that he studied financial politics and economics on his own from 1917 onward, but there is no evidence to back up this claim. 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. He called for the 1932 NSDAP programme that demanded a nationalisation of all banks and an abolition of interest.

In 1919, Feder, together with Anton Drexler, Dietrich Eckart and Karl Harrer, were involved in the founding of the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers' Party-DAP). Adolf Hitler met him in the summer of 1919 while he was in an anti-Bolshevik training course at Munich university—funded by the army and organized by Major Karl Mayr—and Feder became his mentor in finance and economics. He helped to inspire Hitler's opposition to "Jewish finance capitalism." Delivering political courses alongside Feder was Karl Alexander von Müller (son of Bavaria's Culture Minister) who spotted Hitler's oratorical ability and forwarded his name as a political instructor for the army—an important step in Hitler's career.

Feder agreed with Houston Stewart Chamberlain, claiming that World War I had been long planned by Jews to overthrow Germany's Hohenzollern dynasty and grab power for themselves.

In February 1920, together with Adolf Hitler and Anton Drexler, Feder drafted the "25 points" which summed up the party's views and introduced his own anti-capitalist views into the program. When the paper was announced on 24 February 1920, more than 2,000 people attended the rally. In an attempt to make the party more broadly appealing to larger segments of the population, the DAP was renamed in February 1920 to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' Party, NSDAP), more commonly known as the Nazi Party.

Feder took part in the party's failed Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923 and survived unhurt. Coincidentally, he already had a visa for a planned visit to the Sudeten German National Socialists, so he fled to Czechoslovakia. A few months later, he was able to safely return to Germany. During Hitler's imprisonment, he remained one of the leaders of the now outlawed NSDAP and was elected to the Reichstag in May 1924 under the banner of the Nazi front organization, the National Socialist Freedom Movement. In May 1928, after the ban on the Nazi Party was lifted, he was elected as one of the first 12 Nazi deputies. He served until March 1936, representing the electoral constituencies of Chemnitz-Zwickau (1924–1932), Leipzig (1932–1933) and East Prussia (1933–1936). As a Reichstag deputy, he demanded the 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 its ideological foundations" 1927) and "Was will Adolf Hitler?" ("What does Adolf Hitler want?", 1931).^{[citation needed]}

In early 1926, Feder played a key role in assisting Hitler to overcome the challenge to his authority presented by the National Socialist Working Association. This was a short-lived group of northern and western German Gauleiter, organized in September 1925 and led by Gregor Strasser, which unsuccessfully sought to amend the "25 Points." Around Christmas 1925, Feder obtained a copy of the proposed revision and informed Hitler of it. As a coauthor of the original 1920 program, Feder felt protective of it and was furious that an attempt to amend it was underway without his or Hitler's knowledge. At a meeting of the Working Association in Hanover on 24 January 1926, Feder attended, uninvited but as Hitler's representative. The meeting became contentious with Joseph Goebbels, one of the Working Association leaders, demanding that Feder be ejected, shouting: "We don't want any stool pigeons!" However, a vote was taken and Feder was allowed to participate. The draft program was vigorously debated with Feder raising objections on various points. In the end, the Strasser draft was not approved. Shortly afterward, on 14 February, Hitler called a leadership meeting known as the Bamberg Conference where he forcefully opposed the positions advocated by the Working Association and insisted that the original program be retained intact. Strasser was made to retrieve all copies of the draft program that had been distributed. Hitler reasserted his authority as supreme Party leader and stamped out any potential threat from the Working Association, which faded into irrelevance and was formally dissolved later in the year.