The author uses a number of questionable techniques. His chapter titles are tabloid. Qualifications are introduced less prominently.  One of his main themes is that postwar Europe has been shaped by indiscriminate revenge visited on the defeated Germans upon Hitler's defeat. The threat, or promise, of vengeance against them "permeated everything," he claims. "Vengeance", "Revenge", "The Thirst for Blood", "The Revenge of Jewish Prisoners", "Vengeance Unrestrained", and "The Purpose of Vengeance" all appear in headings. A subtitle goes as far as calling some postwar detention camps in Poland for Nazi suspects "The New ‘Extermination Camps'". The term "extermination camp" refers in common usage to a place where victims were systematically murdered in gas chambers. Yet Lowe makes clear that that "there is absolutely no evidence . . . of an official policy of extermination" in the postwar camps in question. So, why does he use the term "extermination camps" (albeit in quotation marks) in the first place? Why does he state that they were not extermination camps only ten pages later?

Much of the book consists of recycling  accounts of postwar atrocities or alleged atrocities emanating from former Nazis or from Hitler's former Central European allies. The ground for criticism of Lowe is not that he uses these sources but that he tends to do so without making the origins of the writers he cites sufficiently clear to the reader. Works commissioned after the war by Theodor Oberländer, the Nazi-tainted minister for displaced persons in Konrad Adenauer's West German government, are given too much respect. Lowe does not mention that the editors were two deeply compromised professors: Erich Maschke was a former member of the SA; Theodor Schieder was later shown by younger German historians such as Michael Fahlbusch and Ingo Haar to have been involved in aspects of the Final Solution. Lowe makes more than 30 references to their works.  

Lowe's long account of a massacre in 1945 of Croatians by Tito partisans at Bleiburg is drawn largely from the work of a postwar émigré from Croatia to the United States. It might have been appropriate to mention the author's close connections with and admiration for Krunoslav Draganovic, the Croatian priest who ran the organisation which arranged the escape of war criminals such as Klaus Barbie from Italy to Argentina. The same author recently wrote an open letter to the Croatian president in which he attacked Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial institution in Jerusalem, and referred to "Serbian-Jewish lies" and "the so-called Holocaust in [the Croatian concentration camp of] Jasenovac". Such language ought to provide further warning that the testimony gathered by the author and cited by Lowe needs to be examined with some caution.

On the "Nemmersdorf massacre" of German civilians by Russian forces in October 1944, Lowe cites as a main source a report of the following month in a Swiss newspaper. He does not reveal that the name of the reporter was not given in the newspaper, that he has no idea of the reporter's nationality and that the despatch was part of a propaganda exercise orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels.