A claim in recent discussion of what has been called the «Holocaust Industry» is that the Nazi Holocaust has been used as a source of «moral capital»: a commodity to be appropriated for political effect in the competition for resources, public attention and influence. The implication is that this is an «abuse» of the past, distinguished from another, more authentic, ethical, or critical sort of relationship that we might have to it. This article considers possible (and problematic) dimensions of a distinction between true and exploitative relations to the past. I make two main claims. One is that the possibility of «doing justice» (in both an ethical and a representational sense) to the past indeed depends on there being an available contrast between its use for moral capital and a genuine attention to its specificity - as does the more problematic business of learning lessons from historical events. A second claim is that adequately considering what the second might mean requires way of approaching «remembrance» which is at odds with both «traditional» (positivist) and postmodernist views of the nature of history.