Allies Salute Berlin for the Last Time : Military: French, British and U.S. troops hold muted farewell parade. Departing Russian soldiers were not included.

Nearly 2,000 U.S., French and British soldiers shouldered their rifles and marched for the last time down Berlin’s monument-studded main boulevard in a farewell parade that provided a muted final chapter to the long saga of the Cold War.

Paratroopers made a farewell jump under a cloudy sky, a World War II-vintage Dakota zoomed down for a tree-level pass, and bagpipers in kilts and leopard-skin capes played “Scotland the Brave” as they marched past a crowd of applauding Berliners estimated at about 75,000.

“For the last 50 years, you and your comrades have been in the front line of defense of not only the freedom of Berlin but the freedom of Europe,” Berlin Mayor Eberhard Diepgen told the departing soldiers. “Without your commitment, Berlin would not be free and Germany not united.”

But for all the warm words, Saturday’s parade lacked the trappings that marked military parades in Berlin at the height of the Cold War, when annual Allied shows of force regularly drew 200,000 people. There were no trucks, no armored personnel carriers, no throngs of pro-U.S. militants wildly waving the Stars and Stripes.

“We used to have parades every year back when Germany was divided, but in those times, people used to seem more enthusiastic,” said Peter Beblik, a native Berliner who came with his wife and small son to watch the parade. “Now people look a little bored.”

Nor was there any triumphal march through the Brandenburg Gate--a lofty, pillared structure that is the symbol of Berlin itself. And, significantly, there were no representatives of the departing Russian army in the parade. Even though the Cold War has long since been declared over, Berlin is still not ready to let what is left of the Red Army parade down its Strasse Des Siebzehnten Juni with the rest of the World War II Allies.

About 12,000 U.S., British and French soldiers had been stationed in Berlin in the years leading up to the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, compared to the more than 300,000 Red Army troops stationed in East Germany. The United States, France and Britain began calling their soldiers home in 1990 as the old Communist threat faded away, and today about 3,000 of the Westerners are left. On Sept. 8, the last U.S. troops will pull down the American flag in a suburban compound and make their final departure.

The crowd sending them off at Saturday’s parade consisted mostly of middle-aged and elderly Germans from what used to be West Berlin--people eager to express their friendship and gratitude toward the Western Allies.

“The Americans are my friends,” said Guenter Fischer, who had climbed atop a telephone switching post for a better view of the parade. “I was born in 1936. At the end of the war, the Russians occupied my neighborhood and plundered all of our belongings. They took away our radios, our bicycles, everything. But then the Americans came in with their armored vehicles. The Russians had to pull out, and they weren’t allowed to take any of our things with them.”

Even though many in the crowd echoed Fischer’s feelings of warmth and appreciation, no one seemed to believe that there was any point in a continued foreign presence in Berlin.

“I’m thankful to the Allies,” said Rainer Schoewe, a western Berliner who brought his two small children to watch Saturday’s ceremonies. “But I’m not sad that they’re leaving. They’re not necessary anymore. As long as Germany was divided, I was happy that they were here, but now that we are together, as a German, I’m happy that they are leaving.”

The only point where any bitterness arose among the onlookers was in the way the parade’s German organizers had refused to let the Russian army take part.

It was, after all, the Red Army that captured Berlin in the spring of 1945, virtually single-handedly, and at a cost of more than 300,000 Soviet lives over three terrible weeks.

But in planning its official farewell to the Allies, the Berlin government initially planned to let the Western forces hold a full-fledged military parade--marching through the Brandenburg Gate and all--and excluded the Russians entirely, asking them to hold their own goodby party far away in the eastern German town of Weimar.

The Russian commander for Germany, Gen. Matvei Burlakov, complained, and the Germans eventually said the Russians could march in Berlin--but not with the other Allies. To further soothe the Russians, the Germans scaled back the scope of the Western parade, dropping the symbolic Brandenburg Gate segment from the route.

The compromise, and the way it fails to acknowledge the Soviets’ 1945 role as Berlin’s liberators, has left some deeply wounded feelings, particularly on the part of East Germans, who believe that their part of Germany has been mistreated by western Germany since unification.

“Maybe I’m biased, but I don’t like this,” said Manfred Behrens, who traveled to Berlin from a small town in former East Germany to watch the Allies march. “East Germany didn’t consist of 17 million enemies of the Russians. If all 17 million East Germans had hated the Russians so much, there would have been a revolution much earlier. There are many people who just don’t want to recognize this fact.”