  Two prominent conjectures by Herbert J. Ryser have been falsely attributed to
a somewhat obscure conference proceedings that he wrote in German. Here we
provide a translation of that paper and try to correct the historical record at
least as far as what was conjectured in it. The two conjectures relate to
transversals in Latin squares of odd order and to the relationship between the
covering number and the matching number of multipartite hypergraphs.
