http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070915/wl_canada_nm/canada_phones_col

TORONTO (Reuters) - Canada's biggest phone company has apologized after a punk-rock reference to the Holocaust appeared on billboard advertisements for its cell phones.

The ads for Bell Canada's Solo discount service showed a young woman decked out in flashy punk rock attire, with a button that reads "Belsen was a gas" -- the controversial title of a song by the Sex Pistols, and a reference to Nazi Germany's Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

"It was inadvertent," Bell Canada spokesman Mark Langton said on Friday, noting that the dozen ads were taken down as soon as the company realized its mistake. "Obviously, we would never depict such an offensive slogan in our advertising."

He said Bell officials approved the ads after examining sample images that were smaller than the final billboards. The button inscription could only be read when the ads were blown up to their full size, he said.

"In the proofing and approval materials, it was impossible to see the button, so our folks missed it."

BCE apologizes "for any offense or distress that we caused," Langton said.

The billboards appeared in mass-transit systems in Vancouver, British Columbia, as well as in Toronto, which has a large Jewish community and many Holocaust survivors.

Belsen Was a Gas

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 held dear
Oh dear

Sergeant majors on the march
Wash their bodies in the starch
See them all die one by one
Guess it's dead guess it's glad
So bad

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 held dear
Oh dear

Be a man be a man Belsen was a gas
Be a man kill somone kill yourself be a man
Be someone kill somone be a man kill yourself

What's so objectionable? Those lyrics are lame.