"80,000 candles will be lit outside parliament, where Austrians cheered Hitler's arrival 70 years ago." Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer told parliament that no pay-off could undo what had been done. "I can only humbly beg survivors and their relatives to accept this gesture for what it is: a trifling acknowledgement of the injustice that was done to you," he said.
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"On Tuesday, Vienna's Jewish community formally re-opened the Hakoah sports club complex which had been confiscated by the Nazis in 1938."
More than France has done, surely; Austria is publicly agonizing over its role in the Holocaust. France hasn't even acknowledged its role. It revels in the myth of its resistance, and ignores its Vichyism.
"Mr Gusenbauer also announced that the government would build a Simon Wiesenthal Centre in honour of the Nazi hunter who died in 2005.""The anniversary of the Anschluss has revived debate among Austrians about whether they were victims or supporters of the Third Reich.
Otto von Habsburg, 95, the son of Austria's last emperor, told a commemorative meeting that no state in Europe had "a greater right than Austria to call itself a victim".
But the president of the lower house of parliament, Barbara Prammer, told Wednesday's session that Austrians were complicit in Nazi crimes.
She said any suggestion that they had been forced to commit atrocities was a "fiction of history"."
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