The Story of the Madonna and Child Picture Created by a German Pastor but Shunned by the Nazis

The Stalingrad Madonna by Kurt Reuber on display at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin on Aug. 27, 2024. Achim Wagner/Shutterstock

Commentary

A charcoal drawing of the Madonna and child by a German pastor during the Battle of Stalingrad at Christmas in 1942 was meant to mark the festive season, but his artwork was suppressed by the Nazis.

In the summer of 1942 as World War II entered its fourth year, the Wehrmacht High Command decided to strike southwest, deeper into the Soviet Union. The target was ultimately the oilfields south of the Caucasus, desperately needed to keep the German war machine operating, and an intermediate aim was the capture of the city of Stalingrad.

Taking Stalingrad would disrupt Russian supply chains along the Volga River and deal an immense propaganda blow by capturing the city named after the Soviet leader. German blitzkrieg tactics initially again proved successful, and by July the Red Army had been pushed back to the outskirts of the city, which had already been largely reduced to rubble from the bombing raids of the Luftwaffe.

Joseph Stalin had ordered that his namesake city be defended at all costs. Reinforcements poured in, the Soviet resistance stiffened, and a battle—perhaps the most intense in human history—was waged hand-to-hand, building-to-building over the ensuing months. German optimism gradually gave way to concern, as not only had their Sixth Army failed to cross the Volga but they found that they were now surrounded by encircling Soviet units, cut off from any real help.

Adolf Hitler refused his generals’ pleas to allow the trapped forces to break out, insisting that they could be supplied from the air and ultimately rescued by relief columns of other advancing armies. As winter descended, the plight of the German troops inside what they called der Kessel—the Cauldron—grew nearly unbearable. Short on proper clothing, food, fuel, and ammunition, morale and hope plummeted.

No nation, even one under Nazi rule, loves Christmas as much as Germany. The approach of Dec. 25 drew the mind of every soldier to the holy season that their families at home would be experiencing and the horror that they were themselves enduring. They sang “Stille Nacht,” shared any long-hoarded treats, lit stubs of candles in their dugouts, and endured the never-ending shelling and sniping.

Trapped inside the doomed “cauldron” at Stalingrad in December 1942, a Wehrmacht physician and pastor named Kurt Reuber felt compelled to reach out and touch the heart of the festival he knew his fellow troops were focusing on in the midst of their misery. He took a large captured Russian military map and began to draw.

In a letter to his family, he described his process of coming up with a way to uplift the troops.

“I thought a long time about what I should draw,” he wrote. “My mud cave was transformed into a studio. This one room, with not enough space to stand back from the picture! I had to climb up on my plank bed or onto the stool to look at the picture. Constantly bumping, falling, with the charcoals disappearing in cracks in the mud. Nothing to prop the big drawing up against. Only a slanting table which I cobbled together myself. I used the back of a Russian map for paper. The result is a Madonna, or mother and child. Oh, if only I could draw what is in my imagination! This is the picture: the head of the mother and of the child nestling against each other, with a large cloth wrapped around them. The one protecting and embracing the other.”

He had drawn a charcoal picture of the Madonna and Child on the map and labelled it “Life, Light and Love, Christmas in the Cauldron Fortress Stalingrad 1942.” He took it from bunker to bunker to cheer the troops at Christmas. Reuber described the effect on displaying it:

“When according to ancient custom I opened the Christmas door, the slatted door of our bunker, and the comrades went in, they stood as if entranced, devout and too moved to speak in front of the picture on the clay wall. ... The entire celebration took place under the influence of the picture, and they thoughtfully read the words: light, life, love. ... Whether commander or simple soldier, the Madonna was always an object of outward and inward contemplation.”

The work, which came to be known as the Stalingrad Madonna, was sent out on the last transport plane to leave the besieged city but the artist was left with the rest of the Sixth Army to fall captive to the Soviets. Reuber, like 95 percent of the troops captured at Stalingrad, died in a Russian prisoner of war camp in 1944.

Reuber’s picture was suppressed by Nazi officials during the war—it was too moving an artifact of a crushing defeat—but is now on display in Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.