3 2 2 D O C U M E N T 3 3 6 D E C E M B E R 1 9 2 8 336. From Ernst Reichenbächer[1] Wilhelmshaven, Hindenburgerstr. 10 III, 16 December 1928 Dear Professor, Please forgive me for bothering you with a request. It concerns two very talented recent graduates of our school, the Municipal Realschule in Wilhelmshaven, who are interested in pursuing studies in astronomy/physics, but lack the support from their families (especially one of them) that would be needed to make it possible for them to attend a university. They both wrote so-called ‘senior-year theses,’ as al- lowed by the new version of the Regulations Governing the Final Examination. One of them (Hagemann) wrote a mathematical thesis about confocal surfaces of second order, while the other (Sechstroh) wrote about the fixed stars. I had asked the director of the local Naval Observatory, Senior Civil Servant Dr. Hessen,[2] to give us an evaluation of the two theses he found them both worthy of appreciation, and in the discussion of the theses, we considered the intentions of the two young men in terms of their future professions. Dr. Hessen made the suggestion of asking for your opinion, esteemed Professor, and to ask for your kind assistance in this matter. Is it possible to make use of some sort of public funds to support the studies of these two students, and may I count on your kind support in applying for them? I would make the two theses available to you, which would permit your forming an opinion about their abilities. Please permit me to add a remark to this letter: I have read your two publications on teleparallelism and the unified field theory with great interest.[3] Unfortunately, they only recently became available to me. I made the attempt to derive the field equations in the general case, i.e., not only for infinitely weak fields, by introducing the scalar densities and as you suggest I have called them and . I arrived at the following results, which I should like to communicate to you. The 10 symmetric field equations are: = or = , the 6 antisymmetic , depending on whether one sets or . By contraction I found for the scalar Riemannian curvature K in the former case: . hg    hg  gg   H 1 H 1 H    h a h a    h a    +  –  a         + + h a   h a    h a    h a   – h     h a   – g  H 1 + h a   h a    h a   h a    g  H 2 + +   2    – 1 2 -- oder 1 6 --- -   g h  h a    h a h a    –  = H 1 hH 1 = H 2 hH 2 = K H 2 2n 2H –  1 2   – 4   – + =