WEST BERLIN: BRACING FOR A CRISIS

EAST German guards, their tommy guns swinging jauntily at their hips, last week pulled a striped red and white barrier across the autobahn checkpoint at Helmstedt on the border between East and West Germany. Two hours later, after cars and trucks had piled up for nearly a mile, the East Germans reopened the road and the traffic flowed once more between West Berlin and West Germany. It was a chilling reminder of West Berlin's vulnerability and a portent of what may come.

Under the guise of a military maneuver, powerful East German and Soviet forces moved into positions from which they could, if the order came, immediately choke off the ten road, rail and canal routes that link West Berlin to its markets and sources of supplies in West Germany. Columns of tanks rumbled alongside the autobahn routes to West Berlin. The long snouts of artillery poked above clumps of East German woods. Into Berlin flew Soviet Marshal Ivan Yakubovsky, the Warsaw Pact commander, to assume direction of some 500,000 Communist troops engaged in the exercise.

Perfect Pretext. Against the backdrop of military preparedness, the Soviets began an ominous propaganda campaign that seemed aimed at crippling West Berlin's economy. The Soviet government announced that it had requested the East Germans to use whatever measures were necessary to halt what it claimed was the flow of military products from West Berlin to West Germany. That announcement was followed up by a Pravda article that listed a large number of Berlin-made products, chiefly optical and electrical equipment, that the Soviets claimed were used by the West German armed forces.

While patently contrived, the Soviet charges provided the perfect pretext for interfering with freight traffic between West Berlin and West Germany. Since the products on the Pravda list include West Berlin's major exports, a ban on their transport through East Germany would strike a severe, perhaps debilitating blow at the West Berlin economy. In another charge, the Soviets accused the West Germans of breaking four-power agreements by recruiting West Berliners for the Bundeswehr. Nor did the Western allies escape Russian blasts. In an obvious threat to the allied air rights into the city, the Soviets charged that Western allies were abetting the schemes of the West Berlin industrialists by flying war materiel across East Germany to West Germany.

Britain, France and the U.S., who are the ultimate guarantors of West Berlin's security, strongly rejected the accusations of the Soviets, whom the allies hold responsible for ensuring freedom of access to West Berlin. In a last-minute effort to avert a crisis, West German Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger summoned Soviet Ambassador Semyon Tsarapkin for an extraordinary 2 1/2-hour session at the Palais Schaumburg, but failed to find a solution. After an emergency session of the West Berlin Senate, Mayor Klaus Schuetz appealed to West Berliners to remain calm. They were bracing for what many of them expected might develop into the severest threat to the city's economic viability since 1961, when former Premier Nikita Khrushchev threatened to turn over the responsibility for West Berlin's access routes to the East Germans.

No Reciprocity. The crisis had actually begun three weeks ago over quite a different cause. At that time, the dispute, as so often in the past, focused on the status of Berlin and the plan of the West German government to convene an electoral college there this week to choose the new President for the Federal Republic. The West Germans claim that the western half of the divided city is part of the Federal Republic. In their opinion, the convocation of the Federal Assembly there symbolizes West Berlin's political inclusion in West Germany. But the Soviets and East Germans maintain that West Berlin is a separate political entity that rests on Communist territory, and that the West Germans have no right to conduct political business there.

For a few days last week, it seemed as if the episode could be avoided entirely. Bearing an important message, Ambassador Tsarapkin helicoptered 170 miles from Bonn to Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger's weekend home in Stuttgart. Over glasses of light Swabian wine, the two men chatted amiably as the Soviet diplomat explained a way out for both sides. If the West Germans would withdraw the Federal Assembly from West Berlin, the East Germans would allow West Berliners to pass through the Wall during the Easter holidays to visit relatives in East Berlin, the first such passage permitted in three years.

After declaring that he was "encouraged" by the Soviet initiative, Kiesinger asked Mayor Schuetz to be ready to enter negotiations with the East Germans. Schuetz sent a representative into East Berlin to open the talks. His envoy returned disappointed. The East Germans demanded the cancellation of the Federal Assembly before any other issue could even be discussed. Signaling a switch in the Soviet position, Izvestia bluntly asserted that West Germans could expect no reciprocity for removing the Federal Assembly from West Berlin.

The West Berlin Senate tried once more to reopen negotiations with East Germany, but a telex reply from East Berlin only reiterated the earlier Communist intransigence. Western diplomats were puzzled by the sudden reversal in Communist tactics. After all, even East German Boss Walter Ulbricht had sent a compromise proposal similar to Tsarapkin's to West Germany. Ultimately the most widely accepted supposition in the west was that Ulbricht had only reluctantly gone along with the initiative in the first place. By that theory, he later succeeded in persuading the hard-liners in the Kremlin leadership to override the compromise offer and insist on conditions that were patently unacceptable to West Berlin and West Germany.

Rightist Presence. Almost lost in the commotion was the election itself, in which 1,036 federal and state legislators will choose the successor to retiring President Heinrich Luebke. At the moment, the Socialist candidate, Gustav Heinemann, 69, is a slight favorite over the Christian Democrats' Gerhard Schroeder for the largely ceremonial post of West Germany's chief of state. The anticipated narrowness of the election unfortunately focuses attention on the far-rightist National Democrats, who will send to West Berlin 22 electors committed to vote against Heinemann. Their potential importance in the election of the Federal Republic's highest official may well provide the Communists with yet another reason to rail at the West German presence in Berlin.

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