Wolf Liebeschuetz called his work "extraordinarily one-sided" and a form of ideological "dogmatism" evincing "a closed mind", which he believed to be a reaction to Nazi racism.

[8][4] John F. Drinkwater has suggested that Pohl's theories on Germanic peoples are motivated by a desire to accelerate European integration.

[5] On the other hand, members of the Toronto School of History, led by Walter Goffart, have accused Pohl of not going far enough in his denials of the existence of a single continuous Germanic ethnicity in late antiquity.

They charge Pohl and his colleagues at Vienna with perpetuating older German nationalist scholarship in an improved form.

According to them, some of Pohl's theories on Germanic peoples are still ultimately derived from nineteenth-century germanische Altertumskunde, via scholars such as Otto Höfler, and have not changed significantly since Reinhard Wenskus.