Hundreds of thousands of people have viewed or shared the link to a photograph of the house after it was published on Twitter, the social networking site.
The slanted roof was said to resemble the Hitler fringe, the door lintel was the moustache and the small top windows were seen as the dictator’s piercing eyes.
Ebay and other Web sites pulse with hundreds of sales pitches. “The pieces below have an exceptional patina,” a site called Star-bits.com said of 10 pictured fragments.
The ads are for chunks of meteorites, bits of asteroids that have fallen from the sky and are as prized by scientists as they are by collectors. As more meteorites have been discovered in recent years, interest in them has flourished and an illegal sales market has boomed — much to the dismay of the people who want to study them and the countries that consider them national treasures.
“It’s a black market,” said Ralph P. Harvey, a geologist at Case Western Reserve University who directs the federal search for meteorites in Antarctica. “It’s as organized as any drug trade and just as illegal.”
“This one’s for me being the ruler of everything, this one’s for me being the ruler of everything else, this batch here consists of medals awarded to me each year by army officials who don’t want to die, this one I made myself, isn’t it awesome, I don’t know what these colored rectangles are (but other generals have them too so I figured I need them – and more than anyone else, just to be sure), and these other medals just sort of came with the uniform.”
