BERLIN (JTA) — Jewish leaders are applauding the four-year prison sentence for  a 94-year-old former Auschwitz guard, for his role in the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews in the death camp.

Former SS member Oskar Groening was sentenced on Wednesday in the District Court of Luneburg.

He had admitted to being tasked with gathering the money and valuables found in the baggage of murdered Jews and handing it over to his superiors, for transfer to Berlin. He said he had guarded luggage on the Auschwitz arrival and selection ramp two or three times, in the summer of 1944.

Groening has expressed remorse and accepted responsibility for his role, and did not ask for leniency.

Welcoming the sentence, World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder said in a statement today that “there must never be impunity or closure for those who were involved in mass murder and genocide,  irrespective of their age.

Efraim Zuroff, chief Nazi hunter for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and director of its Israel office, called the conviction “well-deserved” and hoped it would “pave the way for additional prosecutions of

individuals who served in death camps and the special mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen).”

The sentence was handed down today in the District Court of Lüneburg, and exceeded the 3.5 years of jail time requested by the prosecution, the German press agency dpa reported. The court must now determine whether Groening’s health would allow him to serve the time.

During the trial, Groening said he accepted his moral responsibility for his part in the mass murder and asked for forgiveness, while acknowledging that only the courts could decide when it came to

criminal guilt.

Plaintiffs in the case against him included the state as well as more than 60 Holocaust survivors and their relatives. Several survivors testified during the course of the trial, which lasted about three

months.

Groening was held in a British prison until 1948. He eventually found work as a payroll clerk in a factory.

The first investigations of Groening took place in 1977. But it was only after the successful trial against John Demjanjuk in 2011 that courts were emboldened to try camp guards on charges of complicity in

murder.

Demjanjuk was convicted in a Munich court as an accessory to the murders of nearly 30,000 Jews in the Sobibor death camp in Poland, where he had served as a guard.

That case set a precedent, in that being a guard at a death camp was sufficient to prove complicity in murder.

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