Career
She was a longtime peace activist, and also spoke Esperanto. Herz self-immolated on March 16, 1965, in Detroit, Michigan, at the age of 82. She died of her injuries ten days later.
According to Taylor Branch"s At Canaan"s Edge (2006), it was President Lyndon Baines Johnson"s address to Congress in support of a Voting Rights Acting that led her to believe the moment was propitious to protest the Vietnam War.
The war continued for another ten years following her death. Alice and Helga Herz were living in France when Germany invaded in 1940.
After spending time in an internment camp, Camp Gurs, near the Spanish border, Alice and Helga eventually came to the United States in 1942. They settled in Detroit, where Helga became a librarian at the Detroit Public Library and Alice worked for some time as an adjunct instructor of German at Wayne State University.
Helga later reapplied and was granted citizenship in 1954, but it is not clear if Alice ever did southern
Alice wrote a last testament, which she distributed to several friends and fellow activists before her death. Confiding to a friend before her death, Herz remarked that she had used all of the accepted protest methods available to activists—including marching, protesting, and writing countless articles and letters—and she wondered what else she could do. Japanese author and philosopher Shingo Shibata established the Alice Herz Peace Fund shortly after her death.
A plaza in Berlin (Alice Herz Platz 52514°North 13607°East / 52514.
13607) was named in her honor in 2003.