North Korea’s official media denied a media report that Kim Jong-Un gave a copy of Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf, to senior DPRK officials during his birthday celebrations in January.
Citing a DPRK official located in China, on Monday New Focus International, a website run by defectors in South Korea who maintain contacts with DPRK elites, reported that the North Korean leader had handed out copies of Hitler’s autobiography to “DPRK officials ranked departmental director and above in the National Defense Committee” at a meeting on January 8th.
The source also told NFI that, “Mentioning that Hitler managed to rebuild Germany in a short time following its defeat in WWI, Kim Jong-un issued an order for the Third Reich to be studied in depth and asked that practical applications be drawn from it.”
The report was picked up by Max Fisher of the Washington Post on Monday, and from there was reported on by numerous Western and International media outlets.
According to a translation provided by World News Connection, Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) blasted the report in a commentary today, calling it a “sheer fabrication.”
It also had offered some harsh criticism of New Focus International. “New Focus is wicked media made up of human scum,” the KCNA report said, adding “The group of such dirty men talked rubbish packaged in false information, a mockery of media whose basic mission is objectivity, impartiality and neutrality and an intolerable insult to human conscience.”
The commentary piece went on to opine that such false reports were meant to “tarnish the image of the DPRK and hurt the validity and invincibility of the Songun cause,” and characterizing them as “a hysteric symptom of those who are frightened by the DPRK demonstrating its might as the world’s strongest political and ideological power and a nuclear weapons state and making leaping progress to bring prosperity.”
KCNA informed its readers not to worry, however, because “just as it is impossible to smear the blue sky dark with dirty writing brush of falsity and machinations, the forces hostile to the DPRK can never undermine the validity of the Songun cause.”
Although calling the report a sheer fabrication, as New Focus International itself notes on its website, the KCNA commentary didn’t outright deny the allegations made in the report.
Interestingly, at the time of this writing, KCNA has not posted the commentary piece on its English-language website.
In its initial report on Monday, New Focus International said that there have long been rumors circulating that Kim Jong-Un became an avid reader of Hitler while studying in Switzerland as a teenager. The website also said that the head of North Korea’s secret police gave a recent speech to its members in which he called on them to “Stop focusing on ways to make money in the markets, and mold yourselves after the Gestapo,” a reference to the Third Reich’s secret police.