Can we talk about how badly CV's story was butchered due to censorship? It has a ripple effect on the rest of the series.
The Ashford family was originally the Krueger family, German aristrocrats associated with the Nazi Party. Before the fall of Berlin, they escaped by submarine to a South American island where they enslaved the inhabitants and constructed a concentration camp, gradually eradicating the inhabitants. When the family helped establish Umbrella, their military knowledge and experience made them the center of the company's paramilitary operations.
Alfred (Hilbert) was a Nazi fetishist chiefly inspired by a Nazi lieutenant who served his grandfather, his role model in lieu of his incompetent father. Alexia (Hilda) was head of a German laboratory of Umbrella when she was nine, before graduating university and becoming head of the Antarctic Laboratory at ten. The reason Alfred is so military-obsessed is because Alexia once called him her "soldier ant" and emotionally manipulated him into her servitude due to her vastly superior intelligence. It's pretty much a sibling version of Psycho.
Edward Ashford is the most mysterious of the three founders simply because his entire backstory was cut. The reason he helped discover the Progenitor Virus and establish Umbrella was to fulfill the prospect of creating the superior human race envisioned by Hitler. Alexander advanced the CODE:Veronica Project using the genome of the Krueger family's famous ancestor, a model "superior human", as a base. That's why Alfred and Alexia possess blonde hair and blue eyes. They're incarnations of Hitler's idealized white race created as a sort of stop-gap to facilitate true evolution by sprearheading the family's efforts to create a strain of the Progenitor Virus able to create superhumans, since Alexander was incapable and Edward was old (then dead).
The eugenics theme of the series has always been there but it's quite glossed over until BIO5. Wesker references it in the first game when he says "the t-Virus has the power to create life surpassing Homo sapiens." It's then heavily focused on in The Wicked North Sea novel with the aristocratic Beardsley family and its current head, who was genetically and technologically engineered to be a superior human. After that it fades into obscurity until Gun Survivor reveals that Umbrella think of themselves as superior, while CV takes a very restrained approach with Alfed and Alexia's creation. Each of the scrapped BIO4 stories also focused on it.
Umbrella was formed and run by aristocrats who all desired to cement themselves as superior to normal people. This adds a little more to Marcus, as he's the only one involved in the company's establishment who wasn't born into nobility. He was purely a man of science striving to enhance humanity, ironically just like Birkin, who killed him and stole his research. While those involved in Umbrella were complicit in Spencer's ideal of creating an advanced human race, they didn't know he intended to exterminate the existing humanity (including his business partners) and repopulate the world with model humans groomed and indoctrinated by him, his own "Spencer Youth."
Wesker himself had always aspired to use the t-Virus as a means to enact mass extinction and forced evolution, but he had no intention of becoming a god until he met with Spencer in 2006. He viewed it as his moral duty to eradicate and remake humanity for the good of the world. He basically followed the Agent Smith mantra of "humans are a virus." This was partially because he was emotionally stunted and unable to relate to other people by lacking basic emotions, something that was severely underplayed in the series and actually makes him rather tragic. His official biography in BIO1 says that he lived a life of self-affirmation to cope with it. "Self-affirmation theory contends that if individuals reflect on values that are personally relevant to them, they are less likely to experience distress and react defensively when confronted with information that contradicts or threatens their sense of self."
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