Pop music aficionados and fans of the British punk rock band Sex Pistols might recall the 1978 song “Belsen was a gas,” about Jews in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which included such lyrics as, “Belsen was a gas I heard the other day in the open graves where the Jews all lay life is fun and I wish you were here they wrote on postcards to those so dear oh dear, oh dear, oh dear....” The song was a point of controversy (one of many) for the band for years. In a 1996 interview with Q magazine, Sex Pistols lead singer/songwriter Johnny Rotten admitted that the song “was a very nasty, silly little thing ... that should've ended up on the cutting room floor.” You can see a performance of the song here.
But the Belsen saga didn’t end when the Sex Pistols broke up in 1978. In 2007, a billboard ad for Bell Canada showed a young female punk rocker wearing a “Belsen was a gas” button. A company spokesman at the time apologized, explaining that Bell officials approved the ad after seeing smaller sample images in which the text on the button wasn’t visible.
Bringing the controversial song back into the limelight earlier this week, Australian clothing designer Evil Twin apologized after receiving numerous complaints for naming a parka after the infamous song.
Originally created as a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, Bergen-Belsen became a concentration camp in 1942. Although Bergen-Belsen did not house any gas chambers, more than 50,000 people died there as a result of typhus and starvation. British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, and after the war they burned it to the ground and set up the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons camp nearby.
The Sex Pistols may have been trying to be ironic with the song – referencing both gas chambers and the slang term for a good time – as they tried to upset social norms, but, this crossed a line into the profane. Evil Twin should have known better than to revisit the controversial and offensive title.
