In a wooded cemetery in Munich, a white sticker with a puzzling QR code appeared on a headstone late final 12 months.
Then, over the following few weeks, increasingly more stickers mysteriously appeared, till greater than 1,000 graves have been marked like items in a grocery store.
“It’s actually unusual,” Bernd Hoerauf, who oversees the administration of town’s cemeteries, mentioned in an interview this week. “We thought, ‘What may very well be the sense of this sort of sticker?’”
Every of the white rectangular stickers, measuring about 1 by 2 inches, bore a black QR code, a final title and a mixture of letters and numbers, in line with photographs printed within the German press.
Cemeteries in Munich permit QR codes as memorials on headstones, Mr. Hoerauf mentioned, and for greater than a decade, individuals whose family members are buried in cemeteries around the globe have uploaded images and different digital keepsakes to create on-line memorials that may be seen through QR code.
However these are often etched into the headstone or carved as a metallic plate to kind a deliberate a part of the memorial to the deceased.
The latest appearances in Munich additionally raised eyebrows as a result of in 2004, stickers appeared in a Jewish cemetery in Bochum, a metropolis in western Germany. These turned out to commemorate Rudolf Hess, a senior Nazi chief who served as Hitler’s deputy. The stickers seemed to be linked to a far-right demonstration within the city of Wunsiedel, in southeastern Germany, in line with the World Jewish Congress.
On this occasion, although, the graves weren’t linked by faith, ethnicity or another discernible private attribute of the deceased, Mr. Hoerauf mentioned.
Metropolis employees first got here throughout the QR codes in December, and scanning them revealed solely the title of the deceased and the grave’s location — basically repeating the knowledge on the sticker, however offering no different helpful data, Mr. Hoerauf mentioned.
The stickers popped up in Waldfriedhof cemetery, a wooded area with some 60,000 graves, and within the close by smaller Sendlinger Friedhof and Friedhof Solln cemeteries, Mr. Hoerauf mentioned.
They appeared to be posted randomly, he mentioned — on outdated and new graves, on carved tombstones and picket crosses.
Bewildered municipal employees initially recorded the sightings as they tried to determine the supply of the stickers.
They have been additionally a steep worth to take away them, Mr. Hoerauf mentioned: anyplace from 100 to 500 euros (about $104 to $523) per sticker to strip the adhesive with out damaging the graves, a complete potential price of roughly €500,000, he mentioned.
So this week, the municipality turned to the police to analyze a felony case of property injury.
They rapidly discovered {that a} native enterprise that had been contracted to wash and preserve sure graves was behind the QR codes, the police mentioned on Thursday. The kinfolk of the deceased whose graves have been marked with them could be notified in the course of the inquiry, an investigating officer mentioned in an e-mail.
The police wouldn’t title the corporate or share particulars about how that they had discovered the perpetrators, however the German information media recognized a gardening firm as being accountable.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper cited Alfred Zanker, a senior supervisor at that firm, as saying that the stickers have been merely a approach for workers to maintain monitor of which headstones that they had maintained.
“We’re a big firm,” he instructed the newspaper. “All the things has to occur in an orderly method.”
The police declined to remark additional, citing the persevering with investigation.
