In a wooded cemetery in Munich, a white sticker with an enigmatic QR code appeared in a tombstone in late last year.
Then, in the coming weeks, more and more stickers appeared mysteriously until more than 1,000 graves were marked as goods in a supermarket.
“It’s really weird,” said Bernd Hoerauf, who oversees the management of the city’s cemeteries in an interview this week. “We thought,” What could be the sense of this kind of sticker? ”
Each of the white rectangular stickers, which counts about 1 to 2 inches, has a black QR code, a surname and a combination of letters and numbers, according to pictures published in the German press.
The cemeteries in Munich allow QR codes as monuments on the heads, Mr Hoerauf said for more than a decade, people whose loved ones are buried in cemeteries around the world have uploaded photos and other digital souvenirs to create monuments Online that can view QR code.
But these are usually engraved in the grave or carved as a metal plate to form a deliberate part of the monument for the deceased.
Recent appearances in Munich also put eyebrows because in 2004, stickers appeared in a Jewish cemetery in Bochum, a city in West Germany. These proved to be honored by Rudolf Hess, a senior Nazi leader who served as Hitler’s deputy. The stickers appeared to be linked to a far -right demonstration in the city of Wunsiedel, Southeast Germany, according to the world Jewish Congress.
In this case, however, the tombs were not associated with religion, nationality or any other distinct personal characteristic of the deceased, Mr Hoerauf said.
City workers came to QR codes for the first time in December and their scan only revealed the name of the deceased and position of the tomb – essentially repeating the sticker information, but not providing other useful information, Mr Hoerauf said.
The stickers appeared at the Waldfriedhof Cemetery, a wooded area with about 60,000 graves and in the nearby smaller sendlinger Friedhof and Friedhof Solln cemeteries, Mr Hoeraauf said.
They appeared to be published by chance, he said – in old and new graves, in carved tombstones and wooden crosses.
The embarrassment of municipal workers initially recorded the observations as they tried to occupy the source of the stickers.
They also consider a sharp price to remove them, Mr Hoerauf said: anywhere from 100 to 500 euros (about $ 104 to $ 523) per sticker to strip the glue without destroying the graves, a total potential cost of about € 500,000 , he said.
So, this week, the municipality turned to the police to investigate a criminal case.
They quickly found that a local business that had been contracted to clean and retain some graves was behind the QR codes, police said on Thursday. Relatives of the dead, whose tombs were reported with them, would be notified during the investigation, a search officer said in an email.
Police will not name the company or share details on how they found the perpetrators, but the German media have recognized a gardening company as responsible.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper said Alfred Zanker, senior director of the company, saying that stickers were just a way for employees to watch the heads they had maintained.
“We are a big company,” he told the newspaper. “Everything must happen in a normal way.”
Police refused to comment further, reporting ongoing investigation.
