German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble said yesterday at a student gathering in Berlin that he saw parallels between Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea earlier this year and Adolf Hitler’s land grab of Sudetenland in 1938. Russian officials claimed ethnic Russian residents of the peninsula were threatened by Ukraine. Similarly, the Nazis claimed that “ethnic Germans” in peripheral regions of what was then Czechoslovakia required protection. A good parallel, this. But Schäuble also said that there were no plans to increase Germany’s defense budget. “That would be of no use,” he added mysteriously. To wit, the parallel between Sudetenland and Crimea does not go far enough in his mind. Perhaps he is loath to consider what might happen in 2015, 2016, or 2017 at the latest. And there are many more ethnic Russians to protect in Ukraine and elsewhere, including Eastern Europe under the auspices of the European Union.