 Padover reported to his superiors that the Aachen city administration "...is shrewd, strongwilled, and aggressive... Its leader is Oberbürgermeister Oppenhoff...behind Oppenhoff is the bishop of Aachen, a powerful figure with a subtlety of his own... All of these men managed to stay out of the Nazi party, most of them were directly connected with the town's leading war industries, [Veltrup and Talbot ]...These men are not democratically minded...They are planning the future in terms of an authoritarian highly bureaucratic state...Politically it is conceived as small-state Clericalism...".To make matters "worse", Oppenhoff and his associates had displayed what was seen as leniency in accepting ex-Nazis for jobs in the city administration.