Gottfried Feder

Information about Gottfried Feder

Gottfried Feder

Gottfried Feder (27 January 1883 – 24 September 1941) was an economist and one of the early key members of the NSDAP. He was their economic theoretician. Initially, it was his lecture in 1919 that drew Hitler into the party ^[1].

Until World War I and the foundation of the DAP

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 (NSDAP).

Adolf Hitler met him in summer 1919, and Feder became his mentor in finance and economics. He was the inspirator of Hitler's opposition to "Jewish finance capitalism."^[2]

1920s

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 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.

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).

Feder briefly dominated the NSDAP's official views on financial politics, but after he became chairman of the party's economic council 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 Hitler became Reichskanzler in 1933, he appointed Feder as under-secretary at the ministry of economics in July. This disappointed Feder, who had hoped for a much higher position.

During Nazi Germany

Further information: Nazi Germany

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).

In 1939 he wrote Die Neue Stadt (The New City). This can be considered a Nazi attempt at Garden City building. Here he proposed creating agricultural cities of 20,000 people divided into nine autonomous units and surrounded by agricultural areas. Each city was to be fully autonomous and self-sufficient; detailed plans for daily living and urban amenities are taken into consideration. Unlike other garden city theorists, he believed that urban areas could be reformed by subdividing the existing built environment into self-sufficient neighborhoods. This idea of creating clusters of self-contained neighborhoods forming a mid-sized city was popularized by Uzō Nishiyama in Japan. It would later be applied in the era of Japanese New Town construction ^[3].

After the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934, where SA leaders 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 24 September 1941.

Footnotes

1. ^ Munich l923, John Dornberg, Harper & Row, NY, 1982. pg 344
2. ^ Ian Kershaw, Hitler: A Profile in Power, Chapter I (London, 1991, rev. 2001)
3. ^ Hein, Carola. Visionary Plans and Planners. In Japanese Capitals in Historical Perspective (Fiévé, Waley eds.) RoutledgeCurzon

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