Let’s say a Police Department arrests 50 people, holds them for 10 years without a charge, beats them a bit, and eventually the folks are let go. The Police do not even to bother to deny that the folks committed no crime and were unjustly detained. Pretty much everybody in contemporary America would expect the victims to receive a fairly large monetary settlement.
Now say the detainees were a group of 1,000, the Police Department had the express direction of the civilian government to conduct the detention, and the prisoners got beat up a lot, and were held for 50 years. Probably the expectation is that the monetary compensation would be even larger than in the first case.
What if the group detained was 10,000 people, they were beaten and tortured all the time, forced to labor at no pay, and they were held for their entire lives?
What if the group contained twelve and half million people, and the group’s children were incarcerated from birth, and they were held for over three hundred years?