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The ammo rules in the Genevea conventions are ignored by and large today.
The velocity of the 5.56 itself or the 5.45 means that the round could inflict damage on par with many outlawed rounds,such as soft nose lead rounds in other cals.
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Honestly, any spitzer-type bullet will tumble when it transitions to a denser medium like flesh. This means they will tend to inflict more severe wounds than the round-nosed projectiles they replaced (which are pretty stable and don't typically tumble, just bore straight through). It also means that every new cartridge adopted since 1900 +/- a few years depending on the nation in question has been a violation of the spirit of international law.
What makes them legal in international law is that they were fielded because of greater range and accuracy -- the extra wounding being just a convenient side effect and not the
intent of the round. This is why open tipped match sniper ammunition is also legal -- it is OTM format because it's horribly accurate compared to conventional ("open base match" being a descriptive, if silly, term) and the fact that it blows all to hell in tissue and fragments is just happy bonus. A jacketed hollow point pistol round is no more accurate than its FMJ equivalent, so it's format is specifically for increased lethality and that's bad.
(Whole thing is kind of silly, and is kind of ignored as was noted up thread, but I suppose on a big picture level it has discouraged people from going really off the rails in designing duty ammunition.)
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Even in the US Military it has taken a long time to replace many M16s rifles with the M4 Carbines. Granted that not all M16s were suppose to be replaced, but it still was on going process in after 9-11 that got sped up a tad bit.
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M1903 to M1 Garand and Carbine was a quicker switch and might be a better analogy for the situation Germany would have been looking at when the TW kicked off. I doubt they would have been able to implement a comprehensively effective small arms plan before the war went nuclear, but I'm guessing on the staff side of things they had one put together by about 1 Jan 97 and probably had factories going triple shifts trying to get weapons to the troops.