It sounds like something out of Hollywood fiction, but a member of the public came across a series of coffins lying in an abandoned supermarket, only to find they had corpses inside.

The anonymous finder tipped off police in Klosterfelde, who have now removed the bodies.

Officers are now starting an investigation into an undertaker who they suspect of having used the empty supermarket to store the bodies.

The undertaker had apparently rented a section of the building, but never notified the authorities that he intended to store corpses there.

“This usage [of the area] should have been reported,” said a spokesperson for the local authority. “That's pretty disrespectful.”

The spokesperson said that they couldn't find fault with the way that he had stored the bodies – he had kept the bodies in their coffins inside the store's cold storage room – and the paperwork was all in order, too.

Nonetheless the undertaker now faces a fine for “infringement of building regulations.”