( AP ) - Austria solemnly marked the 70th anniversary of Nazi Germany's takeover with a joint session of parliament on Wednesday and the planned lighting of candles in memory of Holocaust victims on the same square where Hitler got a warm welcome in 1938.
Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer and President Heinz Fischer presided over a special parliamentary session of soul-searching speeches about Hitler's annexation of Austria, a decidedly dark chapter in the nation's history.
In recent years, the Austrian government has spent millions of euros returning to rightful owners the real estate, artworks and other property the Nazis seized.
But Gusenbauer told legislators that no amount of restitution would ever make amends.
"No compensation can ever diminish the wrong that the Nazis did to our Jewish fellow citizens," he said, adding: "No payoff can undo the inexcusable."
"I can only humbly beg survivors and their relatives to accept this gesture for what it is: a trifling acknowledgment of the injustice that was done to you," Gusenbauer told the assembly.
Outside parliament, on the sprawling Heldenplatz, or Heroes' Square, people were gathering early in the evening for a "Night of Silence" to light 80,000 candles, one in memory of each of the Austrian Jews and others who perished in death camps.
Seven decades ago this week, nearly one million Austrians packed that same square to cheer the arrival of Adolf Hitler. Wednesday's mood was sombre, the commemorations all geared to reminding Austrians of the horrors of the Nazi regime.
Barbara Prammer, president of Austria's lower house of parliament, reminded legislators that the country shared responsibility for Nazi atrocities because of its complicity.
Prammer said the notion that Austrians were somehow forced to commit crimes was a "fiction of history" that emerged after the Second World War ended in 1945.
"The Nazis didn't just come in from the outside," added Helmut Kritzinger, who heads the Bundesrat, or upper house of parliament.
Gusenbauer announced that his government would build a Simon Wiesenthal Center in honour of the late Nazi hunter who died in 2005. He said the institute would serve as a world centre for Holocaust research as well as "a memorial for all that shall never be forgotten."
The government also said Wednesday it was taking over the chairmanship of an international task force dedicated to Holocaust remembrance, research and education. The Czech Republic previously oversaw the task force, which was set up in 1998.
Austria's "Anschluss," or "link-up" as part of a Greater Germany, happened early on March 12, 1938, when German Wehrmacht troops crossed into the country to ensure a smooth takeover.
It happened a few hours after Austria's chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg, was pressured to give up his efforts to maintain Austria's independence. Three days later, Hitler basked in the adoration of hundreds of thousands of revellers who packed the downtown Vienna square.
Grainy black-and-white photographs of the scenes of jubilation that played out on that fateful day have haunted the nation ever since.
But Fischer reminded his countrymen that even as the Nazi leader moved in, there were Austrians who fully realized that "Hitler is war" and others who already had been arrested or had fled in despair.
"We must examine the Anschluss from both sides," he told Austrian television.
Even the right-wing Alliance for the Future of Austria distanced itself from the country's Nazi past. Party leader Peter Westenthaler denounced what happened as "a dark epoch of Austrian history."
Westenthaler's bloc was founded by Joerg Haider, former leader of the extreme-right Freedom party. That party's rise to power in 2000 after an election campaign tinged with anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic rhetoric led to seven months of punitive EU sanctions and diplomatic isolation.