Well, as a German I feel obligated to recommend those officials to read up on Josef Mengele and then reconsider throwing that name around so casually.
I'm pretty sure Scott is Jewish, so I imagine he's aware of Mengele's work.
E.g., "Goodwin's Law" is supposed to have been coined in 1990, and of course it was a pretty well established phenomenon to earn a coined term.
I know from first-hand experience it was happening on BBS's and newsgroups in the '80s. I would be more surprised than not if it wasn't happening before then too.
(And if you want to generalize slightly, calling someone a Nazi is simply a current way of demonizing your opponent. People have been demonizing their opponents since well before there were Nazis.)