Gottfried Feder

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.[4]

Feder took part in the party's Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923. After Hitler's arrest, he remained one of the leaders of the party and was elected to the Reichstag in 1924, where he stayed until 1936 and 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).

Feder briefly dominated the Nazi Party'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 Emil 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, which appointment disappointed Feder, who had hoped for a much higher position.

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 an attempt at Garden City building through the use of Nazi architecture. 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, with detailed plans for daily living and urban amenities provided. 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 neighbourhoods forming a mid-sized city was popularised by Uzō Nishiyama in Japan. It would later be applied in the era of Japanese New Town construction.[5]

However, despite its consistency with the blood and soil ideology of the Nazis, his concept of decentralized factories was successfully opposed by both generals and Junkers.[6] Generals objected because it interfered with rearmament, and Junkers because it would prevent their exploiting their estates for the international market.[7]

When Hjalmar Schacht took office as head of the Ministry of Economic Affairs on August 2, 1934, one of his first actions was to fire Feder, whom Hitler had appointed Secretary of State in the ministry.[8] Feder ended up becoming Professor for Settlement Policy[9] at the Technische Hochschule Berlin in December 1936, where he stayed until his death in Murnau, Bavaria, on 24 September 1941.