North Korea is condemning a report released by some of the country’s defectors saying that its former leader, Kim Jong Un, gave out copies of Adolf Hitler’s memoir "Mein Kamp" to officials, reports BBC.

The Democratic Republic of North Korea’s (DPRK) Ministry of People’s Security, responsible for policing, issued a ferocious response, which was broadcast by the state’s news agency, KCNA.

It dismissed the report as a “smear campaign” written by “a handful of human scum…moving desperately to deter [North Korea’s] progress,” according to the BBC.

North Korean senior officials were given the book as a gift in January, says the original report by news portal New Focus International. They claim that an unnamed North Korean official in China has told them about the gifts.

"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 alleged source told the news website.

The book, which the Nazi leader wrote in 1924 while in prison, outlines his early life and racist views.

North Korea threatened to kill the defectors who wrote the report saying, that the ministry is determine “to physically remove [the] despicable human scum who are committing treason.”

They continued the threat saying that the “sordid human scum will never be able to look up to the sky nor be able to find an inch of land to be buried after their death.”

The two Koreas remain technically at war since 1953, when the Korean War ended with an armistice and not a peace treaty.

It estimated that more than 20,000 North Koreans have defected to the South since the 1950s.