A joint session of parliament has been held in Austria to mark its annexation by Nazi Germany 70 years ago.

On 12 March 1938, German troops marched into Austria and Hitler declared “Anschluss”, or political union.

Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer told the sitting that “no compensation can ever diminish the wrong that the Nazis did to our Jewish fellow citizens”.

Later, 80,000 candles will be lit outside parliament, where Austrians cheered Hitler’s arrival 70 years ago.

The candles represent the number of Austrian Jews and others who died at the hands of the Nazis.

The organisers have dubbed the ceremony “The Night of Silence” in contrast with the enthusiasm of the welcome given to the German takeover.

Mr Gusenbauer also announced that the government would build a Simon Wiesenthal Centre in honour of the Nazi hunter who died in 2005.

He 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.

On Tuesday, Vienna’s Jewish community formally re-opened the Hakoah sports club complex which had been confiscated by the Nazis in 1938.

The previous day, Mr Gusenbauer opened an exhibition showing how Jewish staff of the State Opera were purged under Nazi rule.

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”.