The East German criminalisation of fascism was about more than atonement for Nazism. While its law makers certainly focussed on outlawing Nazism after the foundation of their state in 1949, they also opened up to international law and new human rights norms in the 1960s. This was not a mere diplomatic move to garner international support for the GDR’s existence as a sovereign state —especially in the Third World—but also became part of an attempt to build a new kind of international legal order grounded in socialist law. As such, East German legal reform efforts, until the 1980s, formed part of a wider socialist project of defining universalist meanings of law in the international sphere.