<p>There is a growing amount of literature on the ways in which the law has been utilised to promote a wide spectrum of memory agendas, from penalising Holocaust and genocide denials to penalising a state or a nation for being accountable for crimes committed in the past. Yet we know close to nothing on how major institutions, such as Holocaust museums, use the law to safeguard official memory narratives. In this paper, I trace two cases of legal battles between the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum and individuals over personal items recovered during the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, asking ‘whose memory is being guarded, from whom and to what end?’ I show that introducing the legal means to claim ownership of the possessions points to a growing rift between the needs and desires of the surviving party and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Holocaust museum that allegedly represents these needs and desires. I conceptualize the notion of ‘desire objects’- personal items found in the places of atrocities - to demonstrate how museum artefact are often misunderstood in the diverse roles they play for various mnemonic communities. I argue that, while adopting the rational myth of the necessity to keep every single artefact within the museum’s collection for the utilitarian reasons of the ‘education of humanity’, the museum diverges from and overrides the needs of the survivors (and their relatives), to maintain a position of power as the ultimate guardian of memory.</p>