It has long been believed that the genesis of the Nazi Holocaust was in the bad treatment of the German leader as a young man by Jews in Vienna.

But Australian author Paul Ham says there is not only no evidence of any mistreatment, but instead Hitler had numerous Jewish friends, benefactors and a love interest.

Whatever inspired Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Holocaust, Australian author Paul Ham says it was not his youthful mistreatment by Jews in Vienna.

When the penniless artist found his way to a Viennese men’s hostel in 1909, his benefactors included one-eyed, middle-aged Jewish locksmith’s assistant Simon Robinson.

Despite his limited riches, Robinson shared his pension pfennings with the new arrival.

Robinson was among several Viennese Jews who helped out desititute young Adolf Hitler in the city between 1908 and 1913.

A flowing frock coat that replaced the irate young artist’s blue suit, ruined after sleeping rough on park benches, was another hand-out, donated by Jewish copper polisher Josef Neumann. Neumann also introduced Hitler to Jewish art buyers Seigfried Loffner, Jakob Altenberg and Samuel Morgenstern, whose patronage kept young Hitler off the streets.

“Hitler later claimed his Vienna years formed the ‘granite foundation’ of his political struggle against Marxism and world Jewry,” Ham writes in Young Hitler: The Making Of The Fuhrer. “Clearly, this statement in Mein Kampf was a deliberate lie.”

In exploring the life of Hitler up to the publication of Mein Kampf in 1925, Ham reveals an unstable, delusional, intolerant and unempathetic teen and young man, more often rejected by his fellow Germans than his Jewish acquaintances.

As a shy, skinny and angry teen strolling elegant streets around his home in Linz in northern Austria, Hitler would stop for hours across from the home of tall, blonde beauty Stefanie Isak.

The two never exchanged a word, but when Hitler moved to Vienna a year later Stefanie received an unsigned postcard from an unknown suitor, who promised to return to marry her.

That Stefanie was Jewish in no way dimmed Hitler’s delusional infatuation: he insisted to his only friend, August “Gustl” Kubizek, that he would either kidnap Stefanie and force her to marry him, or commit suicide by jumping in the Danube.

As they walked around Linz, 15-year-old Hitler planned how he would rebuild the city, regularly stopping to deliver long, impassioned speeches.

“It was as though something apart from him was bursting out of him,” Kubizek wrote. “I soon realised this was not play-acting ... Not what he said impressed me first, but how he said it. I had never imagined a man could produce such an effect with mere words.”

Kubizek’s mother was not a fan, describing Hitler’s eyes as “shining, blank and cruel”. In Linz, Hitler’s speeches attacked Austria’s Habsburg rulers and “dismissed as unworkable the racial melting pot of the Viennese Parliament, which consisted of ... Germans, Czechs, Poles, Hungarians and Italians”. If Kubizek did not agree, Hitler “could explode with anger”.

Hitler had adopted populist thinking of the period, which championed a greater Germany that united Austria’s German minority. In rages that championed the German reich, his anger was directed at Slavs, Czechs and the “unworkable” Habsburg democracy.

Ham’s research into Hitler’s youth debunks several myths, some constructed by Hitler himself, others by his National Socialist supporters, and others by observers trying to explain his toxic power. Among them is the suggestion that Hitler’s father Alois had Jewish forebears and badly mistreated his son.

On the contrary, Ham writes that Hitler’s father, the illegitimate son of Maria Schicklgruber who later married Johan Heidler, was not of Jewish descent. And while verbally and physcially aggressive, Ham argues that Alois did not treat his son any more harshly than most fathers of the period. But after losing her first two children, Hitler’s mother Klara doted on her third child, who as a five-year-old became “sullen and resentful” after his brother Edmund was born in 1894. Sister Paula, Hitler’s only full sibling who survived to adulthood, was born in 1896.

Although described as a bully who “could fly into a rage over any triviality”, refused to take instruction and dropped out of secondary school, Ham does not consider Hitler any different to millions of schoolboys.

But he admits Nazi myth-makers made it difficult to study Hitler’s youth, especially when as Chancellor, Hitler “went to extraordinary lengths to suppress the facts about his youth”.

Ham also kills the myth that Jewish examiners excluded Hitler from the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts when he applied in 1907. From 112 candidates, Hitler was one of 33 in the second round, of whom 28 were accepted. Hitler was not among them, with his six sketches dismissed with the comment “Drawing exam unsatisfactory.” After complaining to the academy rector, Hitler was advised to apply to the School of Architecture, where he was ineligible because he had not finished high school.

“It is untrue that Hitler’s extreme anti-Semitism grew out of his rejection from the Academy of Fine Arts,” Ham writes. “None of the five faculty professors who selected the successful candidates was Jewish.”

Another target to explain Hitler’s hatred, his mother’s Jewish doctor Edward Bloch, is also exposed as false. Hitler’s civil-servant father had been dead four years when Klara became seriously ill with breast cancer and died at 47 in 1907.

“It was a dreadful blow, particularly for me,” Hitler later wrote. “I had honoured my father, but my mother I had loved.” Bloch wrote that in all his career “I have never seen anyone so prostrate with grief as Adolf Hitler”, who was then 19.

Rather than blaming Bloch, Hitler thanked the doctor for trying to help his mother, and sent him painted postcards from Vienna. In one of many examples of Hitler’s inconsistency, Ham notes that in 1940 he put Bloch under Gestapo protection, then approved Bloch and “his family’s safe passage to America”.

Less fortunate was Bohemian Reinhold Hanisch, a fellow hostel dweller who helped sell Hitler’s artworks in Vienna. After describing Hitler as undisciplined and moody in later press interviews, in 1938 Hitler had him arrested. He later died in prison.

Hitler fled to Munich in 1913 when he was called up for Austrian military service. If he had to fight, Hitler later claimed, he wanted to wear a German uniform. He was summoned back to Linz to face court in 1914, but when examined was declared medically unfit for service.

When war was declared Hitler was back in Munich, where he joined “the jingoistic minority” to enthusiastically embrace war fever. As an infantryman at the First Battle of Ypres in October 1914, Hitler witnessed the massacre at Langemarck, remembered in Germany as the Kindermord, or Massacre of the Innocents, where about 40,000 men, including many poorly trained students in nine newly-enlisted infantry divisions, became casualties in 20 days.

Promoted from Private to Lance Corporal and assigned as a regimental message-runner, Hitler was twice decorated for bravery, receiving the Iron Cross Second Class in 1914. His Iron Cross First Class in 1918 was awarded after insistant persitence by Lieutenant Hugo Gutmann, a Jewish adjutant in the List Regiment.

Ham agrees Hitler had “serious psychological problems”, including a grandiose belief that he was destined to be the saviour of greater Germany. But he suggests it was Hitler’s disgust at Germany’s capitulation after the sacrifice of thousands of proud German troops that inspired his brutal dictatorship.

Hitler’s Fuhrer emerged from “the confluence of all these things”, Ham says. “The violence and murderous anger did not emerge until after WWI”, when it was politically astute to unleash his anger “on a small minority”.

Hitler was not alone in blaming Jews, who then made up one per cent of Germany’s 65 million people, for the nation’s ills: “Antisemitism was rife in German society,” Ham says. “Hitler picked up the classic political ploy used by dictators, who are defined by what they hate.”

In the end, Ham says that despite a variety of interpretations for the creation of Nazi Germany, “none are entirely adequate”.

Young Hitler: The Making Of The Führer by Paul Ham is published by Penguin Random House Australia on October 30, $32.99.