Chaim Weizmann as President of Israel. Chaim Weizmann and his family lived in Manchester for about 30 years (1904–1934), although they temporarily lived at 16 Addison Road in London during World War I. While in Britain, he was known by many as Charles Weizmann, a name under which he registered about 100 research patents. At the end of World War II, it was discovered that the SS had compiled a list in 1940 of over 2,800 people living in Britain, which included Weizmann, who were to have been immediately arrested after an invasion of Britain had the ultimately abandoned Operation Sea Lion
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