Belsen Was a Gas

"Belsen Was a Gas" is a highly controversial song by the British punk rock band the Sex Pistols. The song is about one of the Nazi concentration camps in Nazi Germany, Bergen-Belsen, which was liberated by British troops in 1945.

ASCAP credits the songwriters as John Beverly, Paul Cook, Steve Jones, John Lydon but Sid Vicious is often credited with having written the song while in his earlier band the Flowers of Romance, as a sheet of handwritten lyrics purported to be in his hand appears in Jon Savage's book England's Dreaming. He is supposed to have written it as a joke; in an interview he claimed that when writing the song he was trying to be ironic. Its title is a pun on the Zyklon B gas used in many camps; "Belsen was a Gas", "a gas" being 1960s/1970s street slang for "great". In fact, there were no gas chambers at Bergen-Belsen, as it was not one of the extermination camps; most of the around 37,000 deaths there were due to typhus or starvation.

The darkly humorous lyrics were designed to offend that generation then in charge of running the country who had grown up during World War II, and for whom the Holocaust was an extremely sensitive subject, with the Belsen concentration camp holding a particular place of horror in the older British generation's psyche because of Nazi propaganda films, which had portrayed the camp in the early stages of the Nazi regime (particularly for the foreign press) as being a well-run camp for Jewish families trying to emigrate from Nazi Germany (something seized upon by Nazi apologists within the UK such as Oswald Mosley).

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