Gottfried Feder (27 January 1883 – 24 September 1941) was an economist and one of the early key members of the
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 27 January 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 later change its name to Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, more commonly known as the Nazi party.
