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Exploring the history of eugenics tied to warfare.

War as Eugenic Enterprise: Conquest, Race Science, and the Machinery of Selection

War has never been merely a contest of arms. Beneath the surface of territorial ambition, dynastic rivalry, and resource extraction lies a darker current that runs through much of human history: the conviction that armed conflict is itself a mechanism of biological improvement, a crucible in which the “fit” triumph and the “unfit” are winnowed away. This essay traces how the logic of eugenics—the pseudoscientific belief that human populations can and should be improved through selective breeding—became entangled with the practice of military conquest, transforming wars from political acts into projects of racial engineering. From the colonial campaigns of the nineteenth century through the industrialized genocide of the twentieth and into the ideological residues that persist today, the fusion of warfare and eugenic thinking reveals one of history’s most disturbing continuities.

The Intellectual Seedbed: Social Darwinism and the Birth of Scientific Racism

To understand how conquest became eugenics, one must first understand how Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection was misappropriated by thinkers who had little interest in biology and considerable interest in justifying empire. Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” before Darwin himself adopted it, and in doing so he supplied European imperialists with a vocabulary that made conquest sound like natural law rather than naked aggression. If nature selected the strong and discarded the weak, then European domination of Africa, Asia, and the Americas could be framed not as theft and violence but as an inevitable expression of biological superiority playing itself out on the world stage. This was a profound distortion of Darwin’s actual work, which described a value-neutral process operating over immense timescales, not a moral justification for human cruelty. Yet the distortion proved politically useful. Social Darwinism gave colonial powers a scientific-sounding rationale for practices that were, in truth, driven by economic greed and strategic calculation. The Belgian exploitation of the Congo, the British subjugation of India, the German extermination campaigns against the Herero and Nama peoples in what is now Namibia—all were increasingly narrated through a lens that cast the colonized as biologically inferior populations whose suffering and death were simply nature taking its course. War against these populations was not war in the conventional sense between comparable states; it was framed as a hygienic operation, clearing away human material deemed evolutionarily obsolete.

Colonial Warfare as Proto-Eugenic Practice

The German campaign against the Herero and Nama between 1904 and 1908 stands as a particularly stark bridge between colonial conquest and eugenic ideology. General Lothar von Trotha’s extermination order explicitly framed the conflict in terms that anticipated twentieth-century genocidal rhetoric, describing the Herero as a people who no longer belonged within German territory and whose continued existence was incompatible with colonial order. Survivors were forced into the Namib Desert to die of thirst, or interned in concentration camps where medical experiments were conducted on prisoners—experiments whose findings would later inform racial science taught in German universities. Eugen Fischer, who studied mixed-race children in the colony and published influential work on racial hybridity, would go on to mentor students who applied his theories in far more catastrophic settings decades later.

This pattern repeated across empires. The Spanish reconcentrado policies in Cuba, American counterinsurgency in the Philippines, and British concentration camps during the Boer War all combined military necessity with a discourse of racial hierarchy that treated conquered populations as biologically distinct categories to be managed, contained, or eliminated rather than as political adversaries to be defeated and negotiated with. Conquest wars were beginning to absorb the vocabulary of public health and animal husbandry: populations were “contained,” “culled,” or allowed to “die out” as though the outcome were a matter of demographic hygiene rather than deliberate policy.

The Eugenics Movement Comes of Age

By the early twentieth century, eugenics had matured from a loose set of social Darwinist assumptions into an organized scientific and political movement with institutional backing across the United States, Britain, and continental Europe. Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, had coined the term itself in 1883, and by the 1900s eugenics societies, university departments, and government commissions were promoting programs of selective breeding, forced sterilization, and immigration restriction based explicitly on racial and hereditary criteria. The United States led the world in compulsory sterilization laws, with California alone sterilizing tens of thousands of people deemed unfit before the practice was widely abandoned. These domestic programs operated in peacetime, but they shared a conceptual foundation with colonial warfare: both treated entire categories of human beings as biological liabilities whose reproduction or continued existence threatened the health of the national or racial body. This domestic eugenics infrastructure did not remain separate from military affairs. It supplied the intellectual scaffolding that would later allow war itself to be reimagined as an instrument of population engineering rather than merely a tool of territorial or political contest. When nations began to think of their own populations in eugenic terms—sorting citizens into categories of value based on heredity—it became a short conceptual step to apply the same framework to enemy populations encountered through war, treating military victory as an opportunity to reshape the demographic composition of conquered territory.

Nazi Germany: The Fullest Synthesis of War and Eugenics

Nowhere did the fusion of conquest and eugenics reach a more complete and horrifying expression than in the Third Reich. National Socialist ideology did not treat racial purification and military expansion as separate projects pursued in parallel; it treated them as a single, unified undertaking. Adolf Hitler’s concept of Lebensraum, or living space, explicitly linked territorial conquest in Eastern Europe to a demographic vision in which Slavic populations would be displaced, enslaved, or exterminated to make room for German settlers deemed racially superior. The invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union was planned from the outset with population policy in mind: the Generalplan Ost outlined the removal of tens of millions of people from conquered territories through starvation, deportation, and mass killing, to be followed by German colonization of the emptied land.

This was warfare conducted as an explicit eugenic operation on a continental scale. The Wehrmacht’s advances into the Soviet Union were accompanied by Einsatzgruppen units whose task was not military engagement with opposing forces but the systematic murder of Jewish civilians, Roma people, and others classified as racially undesirable. The machinery of the Holocaust developed alongside and through the machinery of conquest, sharing personnel, logistics, and ideological justification. Nazi doctors who had cut their teeth on the T4 euthanasia program, which murdered disabled Germans deemed unworthy of life, later applied their skills in concentration camps established in occupied territory. The war in the East was, in the mind of its architects, simultaneously a campaign against a political enemy and a vast eugenic experiment aimed at reshaping the biological map of Europe.

What makes the Nazi case so instructive is how thoroughly it collapsed the distinction between military and eugenic objectives that earlier colonial powers had at least rhetorically maintained. Where British or American eugenicists had spoken of racial hygiene as a domestic policy matter, and colonial administrators had treated the death of subject populations as an unfortunate byproduct of conquest, Nazi planners made racial reengineering the explicit purpose of the war itself. Victory was defined not merely as the defeat of enemy armies but as the successful reordering of Europe’s population according to a racial hierarchy determined in advance by pseudo-scientific doctrine.

Echoes Beyond 1945: Ethnic Cleansing and the Persistence of the Pattern

The defeat of Nazi Germany discredited eugenics as an openly avowed state ideology, yet the underlying logic proved remarkably durable, resurfacing under different names in subsequent conflicts. The term “ethnic cleansing,” which entered common usage during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, describes a practice with clear conceptual roots in the older fusion of conquest and biological purification: the use of military force to remove or eliminate a population defined by ethnicity or religion from a given territory, with the explicit goal of altering that territory’s demographic composition. The Srebrenica massacre and the broader campaign of violence against Bosniak Muslims combined military objectives with an ideology that framed the target population as a biological and cultural contaminant to be purged from the land.

The Rwandan genocide of 1994, though not a conventional interstate war, similarly demonstrated how colonial-era racial classification—in this case, the rigid Hutu-Tutsi distinction codified and hardened by Belgian colonial administrators who had measured skulls and issued identity cards based on supposed racial type—could be reactivated to fuel mass killing framed in exterminationist, quasi-biological terms. Radio broadcasts describing Tutsis as “cockroaches” echoed the dehumanizing vocabulary that had characterized earlier eugenic campaigns, treating a human population as vermin to be exterminated for the health of the social body.

Contemporary Resonances

In the present era, few states openly proclaim eugenic ambitions as a war aim, yet the underlying pattern has not vanished so much as it has become diffuse and coded. Contemporary discourse around demographic replacement theories, which circulate among extremist movements in Europe and North America, revives the old anxiety that a dominant population faces displacement by supposedly inferior or hostile groups, and this anxiety has motivated actual acts of mass violence carried out by individuals who explicitly cited such theories as justification. Advances in genetic technology raise new questions about whether reproductive and biotechnological tools might someday be harnessed by state actors pursuing population engineering goals under a more clinical, technocratic vocabulary than the openly racist language of the early twentieth century. The history traced here does not suggest that every war carries a eugenic dimension, nor does it diminish the many other forces—economic, political, religious—that drive armed conflict. It does suggest that the boundary between conquest and biological ideology has proven porous across more than a century of documented history, and that societies remain vulnerable to the seductive but false idea that violence against a population can be understood as a form of natural or scientific selection rather than what it always actually is: a moral and political choice with catastrophic human consequences. Recognizing this pattern is not an academic exercise alone; it remains a necessary safeguard against its recurrence.