The COVID-19 autopsy and biospecimen registry of the five university pathology institutes in southwestern Germany is coordinated by the DZIF Tissue Bank at the Heidelberg site. The DZIF Tissue Bank is part of BioMaterialBank Heidelberg (BMBH) and a partner of the German Biobank Network (GBN). More than 9,000 tissue samples from COVID-19 patients are already stored in the tissue bank. As part of the registry project, cryopreserved as well as formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissue samples from the heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, kidneys, liver, spleen, tonsils and thymus have been archived from standardized autopsies of people who died in connection with COVID-19 since March 2020. With the end of the funding phase by the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts Baden-Württemberg at the end of 2024, the registry was fully transferred to the DZIF Tissue Bank and is available to DZIF researchers.