Editing Lithuania Minor (section)

===Germanization===
The process of Germanization of other ethnic groups was complex. It included direct and indirect Germanization. Old Prussians were welcomed with the same civil rights as Germans after they were converted, while the Old Prussian nobility waited to receive their rights. There were about nine thousand farms left empty after the plague of 1709, remedied by the Great East Colonization. Its final stage was 1736–1756. Germans revived the farms vacated by the plagues. Thus, the percentage of Germans increased to 13.4 percent in Prussian villages as well as in neighboring Lithuania, also stricken by the plague. By 1800, most Prussian Lithuanians were literate and bilingual in Lithuanian and German. There was no forced Germanization before 1873. After [[unification of Germany|Germany was unified in 1871]], Prussian Lithuanians were influenced by German culture, leading to the teaching of German in schools—a practice common throughout northern and eastern Europe. The [[Germanization]] of Lithuania Minor accelerated in the second half of the 19th century, when German was made compulsory in the education system at all levels, although newspapers and books were freely published and church services were held in the Lithuanian language, even during the Nazi era. At the same time, Lithuanian periodicals were printed in areas not far from Russian-controlled Lithuania, such as ''[[Auszra]]'' or ''[[Varpas]]'', and smuggled into [[Lithuania proper]]. Between the two world wars, in the regions lost by Russia following the [[Treaty of Brest-Litovsk]], Russian and Jewish communists printed seditious literature in local languages until 1933.