The report on the power relationships between the citizen and the state which she drafted, and in 1988 presented, known as the "Neuenhagen Letter", was a significant precursor to the changes of 1989 which led to the ending, in the early summer of 1990, of the one-party system, followed by German reunification later that same year.
In September of that same year she moved on to the Charité clinic which was, and remains, in effect the medical faculty of the Humboldt University in Berlin, where she studied medicine.
[2] During 1965 she relocated to Dresden, appointed to a position as a senior research assistant at the "Carl Gustav Carus" Medical Academy (as it was known at that time) where she remained for a decade, until 1975.
This was the first habilitation awarded for Clinical Pharmacology in Germany, and she received it for work on "Microsomal electron transport in the human liver".
[4] Since the late 1940s the Christian Democratic Union of Germany had become one of ten bloc parties and mass organisations with seats in the East German national parliament (Volkstag).
In the central European countries that based their political structures on the highly centralised Leninist model that had been implemented in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s, national parliaments had little power, but the fact that they were seen to include members from a range of "political parties" and popular movements helped to widen the visible power base which formed one of the pillars underpinning the government's legitimacy.
[2] The Neuenhagen Christian Democratic Union of Germany was an unusually active local branch, with a membership of sixty, all of whom could be relied upon to appear for the annual Christmas celebrations.
In shared export markets the Soviet Union and East German were increasingly coming across one another as commercial rivals, while at the government level the personal relationships between the two leaderships were terrible.
On 13 April 1989, on flimsy grounds, she lost the post to which she had been promoted at the (East) German Academy of Sciences as deputy section leader of the Central Institute for Cancer Research.
It quickly became apparent that the Soviet troops in East Germany had received no orders to intervene, and the future trajectory of the Peaceful Revolution became a little clearer.
In January 1990 Ackermann found herself invited to resume her teaching at the Charité where, in August 1991, she took over as acting director of the Pharmacology-Toxicology Institute.
[8] Ackermann found herself back in the Bundestag in October 1991 following the resignation from the assembly of Lothar de Maizière, who had served as East Germany's last prime minister during the summer of the previous year.
Ackermann returned to the Charité, was appointed a director in 1994, and remained engaged as a teacher at the medical faculty's Institute for Clinical Pharmacology till her retirement in 1998.
Else Ackermann explained the move by criticising the misogynistic attitude of her replacement as Christian Democratic Union group leader on the council, Alfred Kuck, and some of his male colleagues.
Ackermann was handed a reprimand for conduct damaging to the party and remained a Christian Democratic Union of Germany member.
He was killed in a motor accident in 1948, under circumstances that were never clearly explained during the period when Brandenburg was part of the Soviet occupation zone and the authorities were implementing a carefully crafted plan to impose one- party rule.