In the aftermath of the Second World War, international humanitarian organisations were confronted with the challenge of responding to the needs of thousands of displaced and unaccompanied minors across Europe. While the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) initially prioritised the repatriation of children to their countries of origin, the International Refugee Organization (IRO), which assumed responsibility in 1947, shifted its focus toward resettlement as a solution to displacement. Yet this transition revealed profound structural tensions: not all children could be accommodated within emerging postwar migration regimes. By the early 1950s, a considerable number of minors had become excluded from emigration schemes due to medical, psychological and social classifications that rendered them “unfit” for resettlement. Designated as so-called “residual cases,” these minors occupied a precarious position at the intersection of humanitarian care and restrictive immigration policies. The talk examines how the IRO sought to manage this group through intensified rehabilitation efforts that aimed to render children employable, adaptable and thus acceptable to receiving countries. Drawing on primary sources, especially from the IRO collections held at the French National Archives and the Hoover Archives of Stanford University, it analyses specialised educational and therapeutic programmes in shaping children’s life chances. Within this broader group, this paper focuses on a sample of children who remained in postwar Austria after the closure of large-scale repatriation and resettlement programmes. These children, who were deemed medically, psychologically or socially unfit for immediate emigration, found themselves in a particularly precarious position within the humanitarian system. By situating postwar child welfare within broader debates on trauma, marginalisation and postwar reconstruction, this study argues that humanitarian interventions often produced contradictory effects. While designed to foster recovery and social reintegration, they could also deepen existing vulnerabilities by reactivating trauma and reinforcing stigmatising classifications. Ultimately, the talk highlights how displaced children’s futures were profoundly shaped not only by the violence of war, but also by the institutional frameworks that managed their rehabilitation and resettlement in the postwar period.