[1] Along with Margarete Müller and Margot Honecker she was one of a small number of women to reach the higher ranks in the country's power structure.

[2][3] She was the leader of the Women Department of the Central Committee of the country's ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED / Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands).

While she was still a young child, the reality of post-democratic Germany came to her home when her father was arrested for transporting illegal (political) books and, for a period, imprisoned in 1935/36.

[2] Between 1948 and 1950 Lange belonged to the Wusmut region leadership of the country's ruling SED party and was a member of its secretariat.

[2] Between 1955 and 1961 she undertook a correspondence course at the prestigious Karl Marx Academy, which led her to a degree in Social sciences.

[3] In August 1961 Ingeburg Lange succeeded Edith Baumann and Hilde Krasnogolowy as head of the Party Central Committee working group and department concerned with women.

This in effect was the so-called abortion debate that was also a political theme in western politics at the time, but underpinned in East Germany by a desperate labour shortage caused by the scale of male deaths in the war and compounded by the massive emigration of working age citizens from East to West Germany in the decade before the inner German border was fortified.