Background
Gottfried Feder was born in Wurzburg on 27 January 1883.
Gottfried Feder was born in Wurzburg on 27 January 1883.
An engineer by profession, he became increasingly interested in economics and, in the aftermath of World War I, became well known in Bavaria as the leading propagandist for the abolition of interest. It was Feder who made the idea of ‘breaking the interest slavery of international capitalism' a major economic plank in the original Nazi platform of 1920, which he drew- up together with Anton Drexler, Hitler and Dietrich Eckart.
Feder held high finance responsibility for the inflation and economic chaos in post-war Germany which had become a ‘slave of the international stock market'. His speeches w'ere peppered with attacks on industrialists and financiers mixed with anti-semitic rhetoric, denunciations of the Versailles Treaty, Weimar and the Reichstag. One of the leading members of the small German Workers' Party of 1919 (forerunner of the NSDAP), Feder's eclectic socialism initially made a deep impression on Hitler, who regarded him as a guide in economic matters.
Editor of the National Socialist Library and a number of other Nazi publications in Nuremberg and Darmstadt, Feder was one of the most prominent Party ideologues in the 1920s and a leader of its populist, racist and anti-industrial wing.
Elected a Nazi deputy to the Reichstag in 1924 for the district of East Prussia, Feder advocated the expropriation of Jewish property and unprofitable large, landed estates, as well as a freeze on interest rates. He put forward his quasi-socialist ideas in a number of publications and books.
Feder's economic policies and his influence as Chairman of the Economic Council of the NSDAP led, however, to a falling off of financial support for the NSDAP. Both Hjalmar Schacht and Walther Funk - future Ministers of Economic Affairs in the Third Reich - warned Hitler against Feder's social credit schemes which would ruin the German economy. Hitler realized that only by abandoning Feder’s aggressive anti-capitalism could he win the support of the big industrialists which was vital to his electoral campaign.
Under the Third Reich, Feder's influence declined drastically and in July 1933 he was given the insignificant post of Under-Secretary in the Ministry of Economic Affairs. Put in charge of settlements policy, he tried to reverse the population imbalance between town and country by settling labourers in semi-peasant villages around decentralized factories, but the plan was thwarted by a powerful lobby of Junkers, generals and the official farm organization. Dismissed from the Ministry of Economic Affairs in December 1934, Feder ceased to play any role in the politics of the Third Reich and returned to private life.
He died in Murnau, Upper Bavaria, on 24 January 1941.
Die Juden
(Anti-semitic tract)
1933Das Programrn der NSDAP und seine weltanschaulichen Grundlage
1931Was Will Adolf Hitler?
1931