He recounts vivid personal stories which he then refers to as typical even when the evidence for generalising from them is weak. For example, Sir Martin Gilbert's book The Boys uses the testimony of numbers of young Holocaust survivors to show that they did not take vengeance on their tormentors when their concentration camps were liberated. There is one exceptional report in Gilbert's book of a ten-year-old who did kill Germans. It is this alone which rates a mention by Lowe. Lowe's researches do reveal examples of revenge — in the case of the Zgoda camp in Silesia, horrific Jewish acts. But his narrative is misleading. Despite his self-defensive aside that "only a very small percentage of Jews" indulged in acts of revenge upon their liberation, his main aim is to portray such revenge as considerably more common than has been recognised and to accuse Jews of the subsequent "playing down of vengeance". He draws this conclusion by glossing over or ignoring much contrary evidence. He is on relatively strong ground when he describes at length the conditions in Zgoda and the deaths of some 1,500 prisoners from ill-treatment and an epidemic. When he states that "similar conditions prevailed in many other Polish camps and prisons", he goes well beyond any evidence presented in his book. 

He argues that the Jewish commandant of Zgoda, Salomon Morel, ought to have been tried in the 1940s for ill-treating his mainly German prisoners. Whatever the justification for this (and it is considerable), the treatment he advocates as suitable for Morel contrasts with his argument elsewhere in the work that "it simply was not possible to locate all the (Nazi) war criminals" and to put them on trial. Yet it certainly would have been possible for the British, French and Americans to have brought many more Nazi war criminals to trial had they so wished and had the Cold War not diverted them. The policy of the anti-communist Allied powers to bring a rapid end to war crimes trials and to rehabilitate leading Nazis is not part of Lowe's chosen narrative. Even such a classic work as Tom Bower's Blind Eye to Murder, which detailed the British policy from the late 1940s of ending such prosecutions, does not appear in the bibliography. 

The long bibliography and large number of footnotes give an impression of learning. Yet a number of his generalisations are unproven or are based on questionable (mostly secondary) sources. He interviewed a mere 11 persons, including one single Holocaust survivor. Lowe's ambitious attempt to survey the entire European continent in the aftermath of the Second World War meant that he could not always assess and check his sources with sufficient care. The core argument of Savage Continent that revenge against Germany "was a fundamental part of the bedrock upon which postwar Europe was rebuilt" and that everything described in his book "bears its hallmark" makes a good story; it is not good history.