Vienna  - Austria has officially rehabilitated deserters from Hitler's Wehrmacht, a decision that the parliament's vice president Fritz Neugebauer called "an important political symbol" 70 years after the outbreak of World War II, in a statement issued Thursday.

Against the votes of far-right parties, a majority of parties in parliament passed a bill late on Wednesday that also revokes many other decisions of National Socialist courts that had enforced sterilizations and targeted homosexuals.

Already in 2005, parliament decided to grant deserters an equal status to other Nazi-era victims, but without formally rehabilitating this group.

In the debate on the bill, legislator Herbert Scheibner of the rightist Alliance for the Future of Austria said there were many opportunists among soldiers who fled, while Freedom Party representative Lutz Weinzinger said that those who did desert must not be made to feel inferior.

The ruling coalition of the Social Democratic Party and the centre-right People's Party, as well as the Greens, supported the bill.

"Paragraphs don't change the hearts of people, but they change the knowledge and examination of one's own history," Justice Minister Claudia Bandion-Ortner said.

Nazi courts passed an estimated 4,000 death sentences for Austrians who fled the Wehrmacht, of which 1,200 to 1,400 were carried out.

The country was annexed by the German Reich in 1938, and 270,000 Austrians fought in Hitler's army.

Germany's parliament unanimously reached a similar decision in September. (dpa)