 However, the Prussian rulers did not prove to be very popular, as during the bread-riots of 1848–49 and the ensuing political upheavals, which hit the district of Düsseldorf among the hardest, policing was done from Berlin, excluding local accountability.Thus, the Prussian government regarded the Rhinelands as more of a colony, furnishing the bureaucracy, which was based in Düsseldorf, with civil servants that were drafted in from other regions of Prussia.Mettmann was liberated from the National Socialist Dictatorship April 16th, 1945 by a vanguard of the US Ninth Army and then became a part of the British military administration under which the Northern Rhineland was redemocratised.