Gottfried Feder (27 January 1883 – 24 September 1941) was a German civil engineer, a self-taught economist, and one of the early key members of the Nazi Party and its economic theoretician.

That year, Feder, together with Anton Drexler, Dietrich Eckart and Karl Harrer, were involved in the founding of the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers' Party-DAP).

[2] Adolf Hitler met him in the summer of 1919 while he was in an anti-Bolshevik training course at Munich university—funded by the army and organized by Major Karl Mayr—and Feder became his mentor in finance and economics.

After Hitler's arrest, he remained one of the leaders of the now outlawed Party and was elected to the Reichstag in 1924 under the banner of the Nazi front organization, the National Socialist Freedom Movement.

[citation needed] In early 1926, Feder played a key role in assisting Hitler to overcome the challenge to his authority presented by the National Socialist Working Association.

This was a short-lived group of northern and western German Gauleiter, organized in September 1925 and led by Gregor Strasser, which unsuccessfully sought to amend the "25 Points."

[9] Shortly afterward, on 14 February, Hitler called a leadership meeting known as the Bamberg Conference where he forcefully opposed the positions advocated by the Working Association and insisted that the original program be retained intact.

Hitler reasserted his authority as supreme Party leader and stamped out any potential threat from the Working Association, which faded into irrelevance and was formally dissolved later in the year.

Following pressure from Albert Vögler, Gustav Krupp, Friedrich Flick, Fritz Thyssen, Emil Kirdorf and especially Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler decided to move the party away from Feder's economic views.

Schacht wrote in the 'Magic of Money' that "National Socialist agitiation under the leadership of Gottfried Feder" aimed to curtail "private banking" and "the entire currency system."

[15] Feder ended up becoming Professor for Settlement Policy[16] at the Technische Hochschule Berlin in December 1936, where he stayed until his death in Murnau, Bavaria, on 24 September 1941.