After a heavy and continuing first round of recruiting for a world history blogging project that I’m working on (beta blog here), I came across an interesting situation. In all due respect to the Jewish, German, and other communities affected by World War II fascists, WorldHistory.com is starting a new Adolf Hitler blog. Being done on such a controversial historical figure, the blog will serve more as a remembrance of extremest ideas rather than the added attention which is largely unnecessary.

After recruiting our first editor for the Hitler site, it came time to purchase a domain. Using a 1&1 (which is a German hosting company) account, I first tried “AdolfHitlerBlog.com” to no avail. “Fair enough,” I thought proceeding to try several other iterations, none of which worked. In frustration, I decided to try ” AdolfHitlerBlog92938473.com” knowingly expecting such a random domain name to be available, but it wasn’t. Strangely, I got an uncharacteristic “domain not available” message rather than the usual ability to transfer an already existing domain to 1&1 account which it currently wasn’t allowing either.

I jumped onto another domain registrar, only to find several of my previous iterations available. I then tried the public domain registration site at 1&1 (not being logged into my account) only to receive the following message: “ATTENTION! An error has occurred. This domain name cannot be ordered.”

Though the answer may be obvious, I wonder why the German hosting company won’t allow a domain purchase or transfer with the name Adolf Hitler in it. Regardless, I can appreciate the fact that maybe the name is something the company would rather not deal with at any level.