The aim of this paper is semantic classification of German loan words in the Polish language at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. Its research body is the press, published in the period 1890–1910 in Cracow, in the former Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. This is the time in which Galicia as a part of Austria-Hungary enjoys since 1873 under Polish leadership the complete autonomy. The influence of German is no more as strong as in the pre-autonomous period but it is still there. It comes over in the form of foreign words, borrowings and more or less successful translation loans, which, although constructed of native lexemes of Polish, show their German origin clearly. The paper tries to show which areas of daily life were subject to the greatest influence of German vocabulary and the ways how the assimilation took place.