Why Did QR Codes Appear on About 1,000 Graves in Munich?
Europe|Why Did QR Codes Appear on About 1,000 Graves in Munich?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/20/world/europe/germany-munich-qr-codes-graves.html
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The mystery has bewildered city workers and set off a police investigation.
In a wooded cemetery in Munich, a white sticker with a puzzling QR code appeared on a gravestone late last year.
Then, over the next few weeks, more and more stickers mysteriously appeared, until more than 1,000 graves were marked like goods in a supermarket.
“It’s really strange,” Bernd Hoerauf, who oversees the management of the city’s cemeteries, said in an interview this week. “We thought, ‘What could be the sense of this kind of sticker?’”
Each of the white rectangular stickers, measuring about 1 by 2 inches, bore a black QR code, a last name and a combination of letters and numbers, according to images published in the German press.
Cemeteries in Munich allow QR codes as memorials on headstones, Mr. Hoerauf said, and for more than a decade, people whose loved ones are buried in cemeteries around the world have uploaded photographs and other digital keepsakes to create online memorials that can be viewed via QR code.
But those are usually etched into the gravestone or carved as a metal plate to form a deliberate part of the memorial to the deceased.