NEW YORK (AP) -- Even after decades of Holocaust writings, excruciating details are only now emerging about more than 1,100 German-run ghettos in Eastern Europe where Nazis murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews.

The latest volume of the "Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945" is part of a long-term effort to document every site of organized Nazi persecution. It's sponsored by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer says this information "would slip into historical oblivion and be forgotten forever if we didn't have this volume."

For one, he says most people don't know there were more than 1,000 ghettos - or that more Jews died during World War II in Poland and the western Soviet Union than the estimated 1 million gassed in Auschwitz.