HERMANN SCHEIPERS should be dead by now.

Not because he's 96, laughing at actuarial tables. Because he sidestepped death once, twice, thrice, after being sent to Dachau, the Nazis' first concentration camp, in 1941.

This is a different "Holocaust" story because the leading character is not a Jew. Scheipers was (and is) a German Roman Catholic priest, imprisoned because the kingdom he loved and served was not the Third Reich.

While "Holocaust" often refers to the state-sponsored attempt to eradicate Jewry, it also means killing on a massive scale and Hitler's murder machine slaughtered millions of other innocent civilians.

Located on the outskirts of Munich, Dachau started as a detention camp, then evolved into a death camp, Father Scheipers recounted through an interpreter at a St. Joseph's University lecture last week.

In Dachau, the majority who were worked to death or who died in medical experiments or who were executed, were not Jews. They were clergy, plus other "undesirables" such as gays, Gypsies, social democrats, communists, trade unionists and others who stood in the way of the twisted dreams of the twisted cross, as the swastika is sometimes called.

As one who would not bow before the Fuhrer, Rev. Scheipers was declared an enemy of the state, "detained" in Dachau, given a prisoner number and a red triangle, marking him a political prisoner. Green triangles went to "criminals," black to gypsies, pink to gays, yellow to Jews.

I visited Dachau in 1975, to learn about evil. Thirty years earlier, Father Scheipers was imprisoned at Dachau, experiencing evil. For the past few decades he has been speaking out, offering his testimony so no one forgets, or denies the undeniable.

Some do.

For 90 minutes, his bald head barely visible above the lectern, Rev. Scheipers stood and spoke with fervor. I marveled at his clarity and focus, this slightly bent, blue-eyed man, talking flames. When he finished, after some St. Joe's students had pictures taken with him, I asked a couple of questions.

What would he tell the world's most prominent Holocaust denier, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

Through interpreter Claudia, Rev. Scheipers said he was "allergic" to Ahmadinejad's denials, meaning they make him sick.

"It's more than a lie. What is important to him is to hate the people from Israel. That's his thing," Rev. Scheipers said. "So this is what I saw in front of my eyes, that people were gassed in the gas chambers."

Rev. Scheipers' suffering and his escapes from death are too long to be recounted here. Most people, who haven't hidden from it, know the bestial truth of the Nazi camps and Hitler's "final solution."

After Americans liberated Dachau and the war ended, the church sent Rev. Scheipers to minister to Catholics trapped in East Germany, the so-called German Democratic Republic, on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain.

As a priest serving in an atheist regime whose only god was Stalin, he became an enemy of the state for a second time.

"Which was worse, the Nazis or the communists?," I asked the long-retired priest, in a modest gray suit, black sweater and white shirt.

The Soviets, in their gulags, exterminated more people than the Nazis in their camps, he said.

"They were both bad, but in the German Democratic times," the Soviets were "trickier about hiding" what they were up to. The Nazis were brazen - until the walls started falling in on them.

He declined to give one "credit" for being "worse" than the other.

Eventually, Rev. Scheipers will die and take a seat next to the Lord he has spent his life serving. Because of his years of speaking out against evil, his story will not die with him.

E-mail stubyko@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5977. For recent columns:

http://go.philly.com/byko.