BERLIN When British, French, American and Russian soldiers left Berlin in 1994, city officials were left to decide what they should do with hundreds of military properties, clubs and training grounds that had been requisitioned by their postwar "occupiers."

While some installations have according to DPA since been successfully converted for civilian use, many others are still idle seven years later and city officials are uncertain about what role they should play in the "New Berlin."

Abandoned when the Cold War ended, the extraordinary British- American "ears to the East" listening post atop the Teufelsberg (Devil's Mountain) in western Berlin, is one of them.

Its cluster of radar domes, looking like giant-sized golf balls, are all that remains to show that this was once a top-secret Allied field station, crammed with sophisticated listening and monitoring gear aimed at the East.

The facility, complete with a subterranean network of tunnels, has been costing around 25,000 U.S. dollars a month in recent years simply to maintain as an empty shell.

A German entrepreneur has now gained permission to develop a five- star hotel and 100 luxury apartments and lofts on the hilltop site, at a cost of 300 million marks (around 145 million U.S. dollars). The decision has upset local residents and members of the city's Green Party.

They say the Teufelsberg, a much loved skiing and sledging attraction in winter, should be "greened over" and not built upon.

The man-made Teufelsberg was constructed from rubble left over from 80,000 Berlin apartments and houses bombed by Allied planes during the final phase of World War II.

Another huge property complex is on Berlin's Clay Allee which served for decades as the U.S. military HQ, with the American Consulate offices next door.

Now there's a move to transform the huge complex into a campus for the city's free university (FU), created with the help of Ford Foundation funds, more than 50 years ago, when the Cold War was at its height.

It won't be a cheap operation though, with a 48.4 million marks (22 million dollars) purchase price being demanded. The Berlin government does not have the ready cash and negotiations are likely to be protracted. The FU is the youngest of Berlin's trio of universities, with more than 70,000 students.

Until 1994 close on 10,000 American, British and French troops served in West Berlin, while in the East, a much larger number of Russian forces were based in and around the once walled city.

One problem spared the Berlin authorities was Spandau Prison where Rudolf Hess, Hitler's former deputy, was locked up for 40 years.

After he hanged himself in a prison garden hut in the mid 1980s, the jail was torn town on British instructions. A large shopping and leisure center has taken its place.

In the summer of 1945, the Allied powers seized hundreds of houses, barracks and club facilities for the city's postwar "occupation.".

In the East, the Soviets' military command HQ was at Wunsdorf, 20 miles southwest of Berlin, while in East Berlin's Karlshorst district, hundreds of Russian intelligence officers were housed in handsome villas while maintaining a vast Western espionage network against the West.

Today, a new town called "Waldstadt" has sprouted from the remains of the Wunsdorf Camp where 30,000 Soviet servicemen and their families were once housed in a massive complex, comprising hundreds of villas.

Juergen Baumann, a building manager who helped oversee the 100-million dollar "Waldstadt" project, says hundreds of civil servants and government workers now live in the town, which is studded with shops and pleasure facilities.

In Berlin's former "American Sector" work nears completion on the reshaping of the U.S. Army's McNair barracks. Some 140 million dollars has been spent by a property consortium which has put up 520 apartments and terraced houses. The former military parade ground is now a bustling shopping center.

In Zehlendorf, further south, American officials handed over responsibility for the "Nazi Document Center" consisting of millions of personal files kept on Germans during the Third Reich, to the Koblenz Federal Archive in the mid-1990s.

Villas and exclusive apartments are now located where top Nazi Hermann Goering's wartime phone-tapping operations were conducted in bunkers deep below the ground.