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That's why I have always played the first edition timeline with the Federal Republic of Germany and German Democratic Republic NOT unifying. Not only due to the logistical nightmares that would have come from such an action during wartime or that over the nearly fifty year cultural differences that had developed between the East & West Germans... but in an effort to keep the Soviets from using the 'Unified Germany = Imperialists Invaders' propaganda in the other Warsaw Pact states.
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To each their own and all, but I personally have always found the way the Twilight War kicked off to be one of the cooler aspects of the Twilight War setting, since it makes for a much more gray and murky setting, morally speaking. Not just in terms of Germany reunification by force being murky in and of itself, but that most of NATO jumps on board a NATO initiated war against the Soviets and rest of the Warsaw Pact. Soviet propaganda will have a pretty big kernel of truth in it that it's fighting a defensive war, and the specter of German militarism, however much it's not a one for one stand in for 1939, does a lot to explain how and why the Poles and Czechoslovaks stay on board on the Soviet side of things.
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But also as the war rolled on, the East Germans started to work on the development of their own military hardware with the help of their Western Brothers... such as the state owned weapons arsenals partnering up with the West German manufacturers as H&K to produce replacements for the AK-47 and AK-74.
Thus you could have seen the H&K G36 being developed... but as a replacement for the dwindling numbers of the AK family of weapons in the East German arsenal.
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There's not going to be time to replace the NVA's small arms inventory before the nukes fly, not with the war going full tilt. I'd expect that all small arms factories on both sides of the former border are going triple shift turning out G41s, G11s, and MPiK-74s. Best case scenario would be a crash program to convert the 74s to 5.56mm, which would be a pretty easy conversion. (And even with that, I could still see the reunified Germans bringing in boatloads of M16s and C7s from the US and Canada to at least get a standardized caliber on the books.)
But, end of the day, the reunified Germany is just handed a logistical nightmare. I think they're more interesting playing that ball where it lies, too, rather than giving them a mulligan
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Thus you could have seen the H&K G36 being developed... but as a replacement for the dwindling numbers of the AK family of weapons in the East German arsenal.
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I agree with the other post that G36 just never exists -- HK had no experience with, or apparently interest in, the AR-18 they borrowed heavily from on the G36 before they did the L85 upgrade for the UK, which gets into counterfactual stuff for the Twilight War timeline.
The other thing is that disruption of petroleum production and worldwide commerce will be a show stopper for production of something like the G36. Germany could be building MPiK-74s even circa 2000, with the only thing that would need serious modification being the substitution of wood for plastic furniture.