The article is devoted to the description of Russian phraseological units (PU),
which use words borrowed from the German language and highly assimilated in Russian. When integrated into another language, the borrowed word passes through
several stages: phonetic assimilation, morphological (grammatical) assimilation, and,
as the ultimate manifestation of word assimilation (assimilation), phraseological
assimilation. PU with the borrowed element are idiomatic and have a national and
cultural specificity, since they are created on the basis of the Russian language and are
not calques from the German language, which makes it difficult to translate them into
German. These phraseological units can be attributed to idioms since their meaning
is perceived as a single semantic complex. Borrowings from the German language
appeared in Russian at different times, and came into Russian in different ways (oral
and written borrowings), often through various intermediary languages (Dutch, Low
German, Polish). Historical and etymological analysis makes it possible to approximately
determine the time of borrowing, and the form of the word allows extrapolations to
be made about the place and time of borrowing the word (north-south), sometimes up
to a dialect (eg Bavarian, Low German). The time for the appearance of these PU in the
Russian language is different, but it does not always coincide with the borrowing time
of the German lexemes used in them. It is not always possible to set the exact time of
appearance of PU with German borrowings in Russian, but the semantics and subjects
of the PU always allow this. Thus, borrowed words in PU pass the highest stage of
adaptation in the receptor language – phraseological.