Biography
Feder was born in Würzburg, Germany on 27 January 1883 as the son of civil servant Hanse 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.
Adolf Hitler met him in summer 1919, and Feder became his mentor in finance and economics. He was the inspirer of Hitler's opposition to "Jewish finance capitalism."
Read more about this topic: Gottfried Feder
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