I worked with 2 German Americans who experienced WWII. One was an artilleryman on the Russian Front & exceptional cabinet maker. The other a now an internationally known artist/restorer.

Othmar Carli was taken with his 1st grade class to watch a synagogue burning in Austria. As a 6 year old he decided to devote his life to restoring places of worship. Drafted into the Hitler Youth, scars on his back bear witness to his resistance of the Nazis.

Freddy was an ordinary soldier, not SS. Before the army he was a journeyman cabinet maker. 

Othmar is an artist/restorer who restored bombed buildings in Vienna. He met his American opera singer wife Peggy while restoring an opera house in Vienna. Othmar & Peggy Carli moved to her home in East Berlin PA near York.

I remember their 2 year old daughter Mary Anna painting a cow picture and asking her Dad. "Do cows wear support stockings?' Othmar stifled a laugh & said yes. I couldn't hold back a laugh. I learned something about raising children from Othmar. 

Othmar taught at the York Academy of Art and created a school to train restorers. 

Freddy & Othmar worked together at a furniture company. Othmar designing furniture, Freddy building it. 

They didn’t get along. 

I liked them both. 

In early days of America’s space program, two men met over a bottle of Jack Daniel’s at the Hay-Adams hotel across the street from the White House. 

It was roughly 1959, when the future of America’s young space program was clouded by technological disagreements.

On one side of the bottle was Wernher von Braun, the engineering genius who had developed the world’s first ballistic missile for Adolf Hitler during World War II. He had once been a member of Hitler’s Schutzstaffel, or SS, but now ran NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

On the other side was Abraham Silverstein, who had grown up in a poor Jewish family in Indiana. He was NASA’s space flight chief and later became director at NASA’s Lewis Research Center in Cleveland.
One former Nazi, one American Jew. Little more than a decade separated them from the Holocaust.

 Looming before two of America’s top rocket engineers were many critical decisions, including what kind of fuel would be needed to blast off astronauts to the moon.

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Who got America to the moon? An unlikely collaboration of Jewish and former Nazi scientists and engineers

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The lecture and workshop will be given by Othmar Carli, aninternationally known art restorer, sculptor, and consultant.Professor of Carli International Institute for the Arts inElizabethtown, PA, he has worked as a restorer for 50 years.

 Mr.Carli was honored by the United Nations for his work on theSobhabazar Rajbari, one of the oldest residences in Calcutta, India. He is one of only two U.S. artists to receive this honor from the UN.

 His other commissions include the Union League in Philadelphia,Radio City Music Hall, Grand Central Station, Manhattan SupremeCourt Building, and the Shubert Theatre in New York City.

Internationally, he has restored such historic sites as the tenthcentury Poeglhof Chapel, Bruck an der Mur, Styria; the State Museum,Graz, Austria; the eighteenth century Hall of Mirrors, PallaisHerberstein, Graz, Austria; the seventeenth century Abby Church,Vorau, Styria; and the seventeenth century Sarba Mangala Temple,Burdwan, India.  

 He was awarded an Historical Preservation commendation from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission for restoring the ceremonial courtroom of Adams County Courthouse in Gettysburg, PA, and holds patents on various artist's tools.

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Workshop on art restoration and preservation