Chaim Weizmann Zionist activity, and executed in 1939. His fate became known to his wife and children only in 1955. Maria Weizmann was a doctor who was arrested as part of Stalin's fabricated "Doctors' plot" in 1952 and was sentenced to five years' imprisonment in Siberia. She was released following Stalin's death in 1953, and was permitted to emigrate to Israel along with her husband in 1956. Weizmann was married to Vera Khatzmann. The couple had two sons. The younger one, Flight Lieutenant Michael Oser Weizmann (1916–1942), fought in the Royal Air Force during World War II. While serving as a pilot
Chaim Weizmann was afraid of the rise of the Nazis. From 1933 there were year-on-year leaps in mass immigration by 50%. Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald's attempted reassurance on economic grounds in a White Paper did little to stabilize Arab-Israeli relations. In 1936 Weizmann addressed the Peel Commission (set up by the returning Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin), whose job it was to consider the working of the British Mandate of Palestine. On 25 November 1936, testifying before the Peel Commission, Weizmann said that there were in Europe 6,000,000 Jews ... "for whom the world is divided into places where they cannot live