Angela Merkel will attend Germany’s friendly against Holland in Hanover on Tuesday, which will go ahead as planned despite the team still being shaken by the attacks in Paris and spending the night in the dressing rooms at the Stade de France.

The World Cup winners were playing France in Paris on Friday when a wave of terrorist attacks was unleashed across the city. The German football association (DFB) interim president, Reinhard Rauball, said the team want to state they will not “be intimidated by terror”.

“For the team to play against the Dutch only a few days after the terrible experiences in Paris is a necessary signal,” Rauball said after a meeting to decide whether the friendly would go ahead.

The Germany players and staff had spent Friday night holed up inside the Paris stadium before leaving straight for the airport on Saturday morning. “The entire team, players, coaches and staff are still shocked,” Oliver Bierhoff, the PR manager, said. “But we all know how important it is to send a signal as a national team in favour of our values and culture.”

Chancellor Merkel will be at the Hanover stadium along with the interior minister Thomas de Maizière.

Boris Pistorius, the Lower Saxony minister for sport, said every precaution would be taken by security staff to ensure it is a peaceful event where families, who bought tickets weeks ago, could feel comfortable. “I welcome the decision by the DFB to play the game after discussions with Lower Saxony security officials. There are no reasons that would force us to cancel the game,” he said. “We also want to send a signal that these cowardly terrorists cannot run our lives.”

Rauball praised France’s players for an “outstanding gesture of camaraderie” after they refused to leave the stadium on Friday night in a show of solidarity with their opponents.

The Germany players later released a statement, which said: “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. 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.”