Hitler House

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About

Hitler House is the nickname given to a two-story townhouse in Swansea, Wales that is said to resemble the face of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. The photograph of the house facade was taken by a 22-year-old British youth worker and posted via Twitter, which has been since viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

Origin

On March 29th, 2011, Charli Dickenson^[1], a 22-year-old youth worker from Swansea, United Kingdom tweeted a picture of a residential house in Port Tenant with the following description:

“I walk past the house all the time, but I had never noticed the Hitler likeness before,” said Miss Dickenson. “But then, at the weekend, I was in the car with my boyfriend and we were stuck in traffic and I just said to him, 'That house looks like Hitler.’ We both laughed. I took a picture and posted it on Twitter.“It was picked up by Jimmy Carr. Now everyone is talking about it!”

Spread

The English comedian Jimmy Carr^[2] was among the early birds to retweet the picture: “Morning. Here’s a house that looks like Hitler.” Throughout the day, the viral image was picked up by various internet humor websites like The Daily What, Gawker, BuzzFeed and Huffington Post and Funny or Die, as well as numerous British news outlets like The Telegraph^[3], Independent,^[4] Asylum UK^[6] and The Daily Mail.^[5]

On Twitter

Owner's Response

It seems that the owner of the house, one Clive Davies, 60, was not only oblivious to the resemblance of his house to the well-known Austrian dictator, but also the last one to hear about the hype the photo of his house created. Clive Davies first heard the news after his son Guy Davies, a warrant officer serving with the 7th Signals Regiment in Kabul, Afghanistan, saw the picture on Twitter and called his wife back in Germany, who then phoned her father-in-law in UK to tell him that his house was internet famous. Asked by the press about his house, he said:

"I have never noticed any similarity before and most people who pass by are so close they probably never notice.Some people say they can see images of Jesus Christ on items such as toast, and I suppose it is just a variation on a theme. I don't really think it looks like Hitler."

Derivatives

According to Daily Mail^[12], Charli's spotting of "Hitler House" in Swansea has since inspired other British internet users to find celebrity-to-house doppelgänger matches, from politicians and statesmen to sportsmen and actors.