Germany’s acting FA president, Reinhard Rauball, has praised France’s players for an “outstanding gesture of camaraderie” after they refused to leave the Stade de France on Friday night in a show of solidarity with their opponents.

Both sets of players spent much of the night on mattresses in the stadium after Germany were advised not to return to their team hotel following the terrorist attacks across Paris. “The French said that they were staying as long as Germany had to stay,” said Rauball.

A group of empty minibuses left the stadium in the early hours to collect the German squad’s bags from the hotel, where there had been a bomb scare earlier in the day. Players and staff then flew back to Frankfurt on Saturday morning.

“The players were very afraid,” said Germany’s general manager, Oliver Bierhoff. “We didn’t want to take any risks and we didn’t know either whether all routes would have been secure, so we stayed. Our thoughts are with the victims and their relatives. We are just happy to have landed safely.”

The Germany players, who are due to play Holland in Hannover on Tuesday, later released a joint statement, saying: “We came to Paris to do what connects us all – to play football, together, against one another and in friendship. To have an enjoyable evening together with our fans, to show sporting ambition, but particularly we came for a fair and peaceful encounter. We all looked forward to playing in the Stade de France, to have a great night of football, which ended up turning into a nightmare.

“It was a dull bang which changed everything. It produced pictures that will remain in our heads for a long time. We spent the night doing a lot of thought-processing. We asked ourselves why something like this could happen? How is such inhumanity even possible? There were a lot of answers but none that could explain these cowardly attacks. We lost a game of football on Friday evening. But nothing is as irrelevant as that right now.”

Fans and journalists who were inside the stadium described the atmosphere as “surreal”. Loïc Tanzi, covering the game for Goal.com, said that while fans had cheered the first explosion, thinking it was a firework, the second detonation “plunged the stadium into silence … At half-time, a helicopter began to fly over the ground. Telephone calls and text messages left no one in any doubt. When the final whistle was blown the PA system announced: ‘There have been incidents outside the stadium, please leave by the west gates.’ Outside … chaos. There was a huge crowd surge and people were shouting: ‘He’s armed. He’s going to shoot us.’ And so we went back to the stands.”

Andreas Berten, a reporter for publishers Funke Mediengruppe, told the New York Times he had been waiting for a lift down to the dressing room area when “suddenly hundreds of fans came running back through the gates toward the field. We thought perhaps there were attackers coming into the stadium with guns.”

A France supporter, Frédéric Lavergne, told the Associated Press: “We heard the explosions but we thought they were home-made fireworks. [At the end] we preferred to stay on the field, that’s where we felt safest.”

It was gone 11.30pm local time before the pitch cleared – with a group of fans filmed singing La Marseillaise defiantly as they walked out of the stadium.

Among those caught up in the confusion were 1,200 volunteers and emergency workers who had been given free tickets to the game to honour their role in responding to the Alps Germanwings plane crash in March.

The Airbus executive Rainer Ohler told Reuters: “It was supposed to be an evening of French and German celebration and appreciation after that tragic event. At first nobody thought of terrorism. It was when President Hollande left and people started getting texts that we realised what was going on.”

Among other tributes, Noël Le Graët, head of the French FA, said in a statement: “The French Football Federation shares the emotion that shakes the nation. We share the grief of the bereaved families and relatives.”