There was widespread support for animal welfare in Nazi Germany among the country's leadership. Adolf Hitler and his top officials took a variety of measures to ensure animals were protected. Many Nazi leaders, including Hitler and Hermann Göring, were supporters of animal rights and conservation. Several Nazis were environmentalists, and species protection and animal welfare were significant issues in the Nazi regime. Heinrich Himmler made an effort to ban the hunting of animals. Göring was a professed animal lover and conservationist, who, on instructions from Hitler, committed Germans who violated Nazi animal welfare laws to concentration camps. In his private diaries, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels described Hitler as a vegetarian whose hatred of the Jewish and Christian reli