Institutionalized Holocaust commemoration in IHRA member states very often serves to mask problematic policies by offering reassurance that the Holocaust was perpetrated in another place, at another time, by other people. Rote commemoration runs the risk of moral anesthetization, and the further removed the original event becomes in place and time, the more difficult its lessons are to transfer to the present day. At worst, Holocaust memory feeds into a narrative of national exceptionalism, in which the capacity to commit, or to be complicit in, genocide becomes the unique attribute of enemy states, and a nation’s own record of intervention, however poor, is obscured from reflective scrutiny.