Among those executed were men and women who supported the Republic, workers, peasants, soldiers who took part in the battle, local authorities and those who were merely suspected of belonging to one of those categories. After the fall of the city, Mayor Sinforiano Madroñero and his deputy, Nicolás de Pablo, both Socialists, crossed the border into Portugal, but they were tracked down by agents of the Portuguese regime and handed over to the Nationalist troops, who executed them without trial in Badajoz on August 20. Afterwards, a testimony was published in La Voz (October 20, 1936), in the Republican-controlled Madrid, that the executions in the Bull Ring had been like a party for the executioners, with a crowd present, and that some of the victims had even been killed in the manner of bullfight (stuck in the back with bandillero lances) and mutilated. That has never been verified although there is some evidence that sadism was indulged during the massacre. After learning of the events, Nationalist propaganda published various other versions of events to try to hide the massacre, and several foreign correspondents were threatened or discredited in the press. Aftermath The massacre of Badajoz was of great significance in the development of the war. In late August, as the Basque towns of Irun and Fuenterrabia were being shelled from the sea and bombed from the air, the rebels dropped pamphlets threatening to deal with the population as they had "dealt with" the people of Badajoz. In consequence, panic-stricken refugees headed for France. The publication in the foreign press of the events meant that Franco ordered that such massacres were to cease, as they harmed the Nationalists' image. On the other side, Republican propaganda publicised the massacre enormously and used it to justify their atrocities, such as the Paracuellos massacre of November 1936. Arising from the events in Badajoz, the German officer Hans von Funck, one of the few high-ranking German soldiers present with the Nationalist Army of the South, sent a report to Berlin advising against the deployment of regular German troops in Spain. He wrote that he was a soldier used to combat, who has fought in France during World War I, but he has never seen such brutality and ferocity as that with which the African Expeditionary Force carried out their operations. For this reason he advised against sending German regulars to Spain, because before such savagery,