Dr. Kurt Reuber (1906–1944), a Wehrmacht physician and Lutheran pastor, was trapped with the encircled German Sixth Army inside the Stalingrad pocket in the winter of 1942–43. He had with him a stub of charcoal and the back of a captured Soviet map. On Christmas Eve, 1942, in a dugout beneath the snow, he drew on the map an icon of the Virgin and Child — a Madonna of war, with the inscription 'LICHT — LEBEN — LIEBE / WEIHNACHTEN IM KESSEL 1942 / FESTUNG STALINGRAD' ('Light — Life — Love / Christmas in the Pocket 1942 / Fortress Stalingrad').
The drawing was placed on the wall of the dugout and venerated through the long siege by the men who came to pray before it. Reuber's commanding officer, Dr. Wilhelm Grosse, was flown out on one of the last German planes to leave the pocket and carried the drawing with him. Reuber himself was captured at the surrender of the Sixth Army in February 1943 and died in a Soviet POW camp at Yelabuga in 1944.
The Stalingrad Madonna is enshrined at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, the bombed-out shell preserved after the Second World War as a monument to peace. Companion copies of the icon hang in Coventry Cathedral, England (the bombed Anglican cathedral preserved as a peace memorial) and in the Kazan Cathedral of Volgograd (the post-Soviet Orthodox cathedral that stands on the former Stalingrad battlefield) — three cathedrals, three nations once at war, joined in a single image.