From the 1950s, the claim that there was a single continuing German Reich whose legal status was wholly untouched by the institutions established by the Allied Powers, and that the Federal Republic was the sole legal successor of that Reich, was adopted both by the Federal Government itself and by the Federal Constitutional Court. On this basis, the Federal Republic claimed an exclusive mandate for the entire postwar territory of Germany. Initially, the 1949 constitution of the German Democratic Republic adopted a mirror image version of this claim; in being framed in anticipation of a future all-German constitution on its own political terms; but all references to a wider national German nation were removed in constitutional amendments in 1968 and 1974, and from that date the GDR maintained that from 1949 there had existed two entirely separate sovereign German states.