Part of the combatants accompanied the rebels after their withdrawal from São Paulo, at the end of July 1924, and some joined the Miguel Costa-Prestes Column in the following years.
Attracted by the rapid industrialization, foreign communities settled mainly in the working-class neighborhoods of the east of the city, such as Brás, Mooca and Belenzinho.
[5] The São Paulo labor movement was the target of the image of the "foreign agitator", typically Italian or Spanish, disseminating socialist or anarchist ideas.
[6] On 5 July 1924, tenentists led by general Isidoro Dias Lopes took up arms in the city against the federal government of Artur Bernardes.
[7] From 11 April, loyalist forces began an intense artillery bombardment, which claimed, for the most part, the lives of civilians, especially in the working-class neighborhoods.
[23] Its participants were not restricted to these three nationalities: their origins also included Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Poland, Russia, Portugal and Spain.
[27] The most cited leader in the testimonies of participants was captain Arnaldo Kuhn; others mentioned João Joaquim Tuchen, Antonio Missoni and Henrique Schulz.
[32] The Italian community was older and more structured, therefore the battalion's members had greater chances of escaping the police and its documentation, unlike the other two, was not seized by government forces, reducing the availability of information.
[33] The German battalion was immediately employed on the front lines, while the Hungarian one initially served as mounted police, preventing looting and guarding the abandoned houses.
[35] Among the Germans there were gunners, pilots, machine gun experts and other war specialties;[36] the defeat of the loyalists' Renault FT-17 tanks is attributed to the previous experience of this battalion.
[37] On the other hand, historian Glauco Carneiro made a negative assessment: "the mercenaries, with rare exceptions, did not prove to be very useful or brave; they were mere adventurers seeking material results"; "as a rule, they had an appalling waste of ammunition, incessant fire against alleged loyalist positions, in a suspicious effort to avoid the adversary attack".
Maximiliano Agid personally supervised the production of grenades and incendiary bombs in the São Paulo Railway workshops.
[7] When the revolutionaries finally reached São Paulo's border with Mato Grosso, at Presidente Epitácio, the Hungarian unit, still present on 7 August, was disarmed due to the risk of desertion.
[48] In April, seventy remnants of the former German battalion defected to Paraguay, when logistical difficulties prevented captain Kuhn from fulfilling his contract commitments.
[49] The São Paulo revolutionaries joined the Rio Grande do Sul rebels and formed the Miguel Costa-Prestes Column, which remained in the struggle for the interior of the country.
[50] Artur Bernardes criticized them in his Manifesto à Nação, published later in 1924,[51] and Correio Paulistano, the official newspaper of the Republican Party of São Paulo, called them a "gang of killers, who, on generous pay, proposed to looting and razing".
[52][53] After the rebels left the city of São Paulo, the amount of documents seized by the loyalists was enough to set up a military police inquiry exclusively for foreign participants.