Please read Alexey Sklyarenko's annotations on Pale Fire, Ada and other Nabokov works here.
Describing Victor Vitry's film Letters from Terra, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions Athaulf Hindler (also known as Mittler — from ‘to mittle,’ mutilate) who came to power in Germany in 1933: