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Notes -
This is actually more complicated than you are making it sound! The thorny questions of German “nationhood” were the source of many wars over the course of centuries. There was a dialect continuum of German (or German-adjacent) languages, but the extent to which these various peoples were culturally- and politically-unified was very much in dispute for a very long time. “German” identity in many ways had to be imposed from top-down. (And we can see the extent to which this process was not completely achieved by, for example, the existence of a separate Austrian state.) The same is equally true of “the French” as a people. Once you start digging into the specifics, the “unbroken chains of continuity” start to look more like frayed ropes held together by tape.
I picked 100 years rather than a larger figure on purpose (and I'm reasonably familiar with German history; that's where I got my passport and most of my schooling!), and I'm happy to elaborate the rule as being against irredentism in case of doubt (so no German pre-Bismarck claims survive). The situations I opined on just all seem to be fairly clear-cut cases of nationhood continuity.
An even easier solution might be to posit a one-sided onus based on present-day claims of inheritance - so e.g. a hypothetical Russian Empire acquisition of North Africa would be morally open to a claim by descendants of the Carthaginians the moment the Imperial Russian government opens its mouth to say something about being the "Third Rome".
(I'm not trying to propose a counterintuitive-but-defensible rule, but rather some simple rule that aligns with intuitions about right and wrong that I have independently, as one does in analytic philosophy.)
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