Allied Controls Irk West Berliners : West Germany: Critics say the new political climate reduces the need for foreign authorities. Pressure for change is growing.

As the Berlin Wall becomes a symbol rather than a barrier, West Berliners are showing resentment at the status of the Allied powers of World War II as the ultimate authority in West Berlin.

Political elements are bringing pressure to bear for a change in that status.

“Resentment is growing,” Eckart D. Stratenschulte, a West Berlin city official, said in his office near City Hall.

It was near here, in 1963, that President John F. Kennedy proclaimed, “Ich bin ein Berliner! “

At that time, after the Berlin Wall went up, West Berliners were happy to have the protection of U.S., British and French occupation forces. Indeed, it was the Allied airlift that broke the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948-49.

But times have changed, and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has presented another side of communism, holding out the promise of military cutbacks in Europe.

Yet the Allies are still in Berlin because the Soviets have never agreed to a German peace treaty. Officially, the Soviets are the fourth occupation power.

“Most of the people in Berlin today weren’t born at the time of the airlift,” Stratenschulte said. “They no longer see the need for the position of the Allied commanders as the supreme authority in the city.”

David Anderson, head of West Berlin’s Aspen Institute and formerly a U.S. diplomat here, said, “It is time for the Allies to rethink their role here.”

Critics charge that the occupying powers have had their day and that it is time they gave up their authority over the city.

The Allies say that although they are in West Berlin as an occupation force, their main role is to provide security and to ensure access to the city, which lies about 90 miles inside East Germany.

Stratenschulte said: “As long as the Berlin Wall existed and Europe was divided, people here said that the alternative to being occupied by the Allies was being liberated by the Russians. But that, of course, is changing. The wall represented confrontation. The mood now is of cooperation.”

The Allies have the power to confirm the city’s chief of police and other senior security officials. They have authority to censor the mail of West Berliners and to tap their telephones. Technically, they can impose the death penalty, although West Germany has abolished capital punishment.

They control the air rights to West Berlin, and they angered many residents by increasing the number of American airlines allowed to fly into the city.

The Greens party and radical elements in the Social Democratic Party, which is the governing party in this municipality and the principal opposition party in West Germany’s Parliament, have been the most vocal in calling for the Allied forces to leave. They argue that the 12,000 Allied troops, including 6,000 in the U.S. Berlin Brigade, are no longer necessary.

Egon Bahr, spokesman on security affairs for the Social Democrats, said the Allies should end what he called the “claptrap” about their rights in Berlin.

Bahr said it is time that “we cut off the vestiges of the occupation period and mentality.” The Allies, he said, should “define precisely

what sort of freedom the two Germanys actually possess and put an end to all this claptrap about occupation rights.”

U.S. officials are aware of German sensitivity but believe they cannot leave until a peace treaty is worked out with the Soviets.

“We are here as the protective powers, partners with the West Berliners, and our policy is to let the freely elected officials of Berlin run their affairs,” a senior U.S. official said recently. “We only deal with matters of access and external security.

“We never said we planned to stay forever, and when the division of Berlin and Germany is solved, we will be happy to leave.”