Gottfried Feder grew up in a Protestant, Upper Franconian civil service family and studied engineering sciences in Munich, Berlin, and Zurich. Three years after graduating as an engineer in Munich in 1905, Feder became self-employed as a partner in the construction company Ackermann & Co., which built military buildings during the First World War. Starting in 1918, he relinquished his business endeavors in favor of his political pursuits and writing. He wrote for the Süddeutsche Monatshefte, which were co-published by his brother-in-law Prof. Karl Alexander von Müller, and the magazine Auf gut Deutsch, whose editor was Dietrich Eckart.
He became a member of the German Workers' Party (DAP) and met Adolf Hitler in 1919. In the same year, Feder published his most important writing, Manifesto on Breaking the Interest Slavery of Money, the vision of an interest-free economy with a nationalized banking sector. His economic policy ideas were incorporated into the Nazi Party program in 1920. In 1923, Feder was appointed Finance Minister of a new Reich government by the Hitler putschists.
In 1924 - at the time of the Nazi Party ban throughout the Reich - he won a seat in the Reichstag for the National Socialist Freedom Movement, a substitute organization for the Nazi Party. After the re-establishment of the Nazi Party in 1925, Feder was a member of the Reichstag for the Nazi Party until 1936. As the founder and publisher of the Nationalsozialistische Bibliothek series, he published the programmatic writings of the party starting in 1927. He became Chairman of the Economic Council of the Nazi Party in 1931, and from July 1933 to August 1934, he was State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Economics. With his retirement in September 1934, Feder's political influence diminished, and from November 1934 until his death in 1941, he served as an adjunct professor of settlement studies, spatial planning, and urban development at the Berlin Institute of Technology.
