Riems Riems is an island in the southwestern part of the Bay of Greifswald , a broad , shallow embayment of the Baltic Sea between the German mainland and the island of Rügen . Riems belongs administratively to the urban district of Greifswald , but is an exclave . Riemserort , is municipally part of Riems , but lies opposite the island on the mainland . Geography . The island of Riems measures about 1 , 250 metres from east to west , and is about 300 metres across at its widest point . Since the early 1970s , it has been connected to the mainland by a 500m long causeway . It has , therefore , been an artificial peninsula for more than 30 years . Before the causeway , a cable car used to transport goods to the mainland . The cable car has now gone , but the ruins of its pylon foundations are still visible . Because the lack of fresh water to the Gristower Wiek resulted in oxygen depletion in the shallow bay , in the autumn of 2007 a 30 - metre - long section of the causeway to the island was opened and bridged to allow fresh water to pass once more . Fauna . Riems is an important resting and moulting area for waterbirds . The Fahrenbrink Peninsula Nature Reserve ( ) is a recognized reserve . Approximately 15 percent of the northern European waterfowl population spend their winter in the area of the Bay of Greifswald and the Strelasund . It has therefore been declared a European bird reserve . History . Riems has been inhabited since prehistoric times as Stone Age and Slavic archaeological finds demonstrate . The island later belonged , together with the adjacent village of Gristow , to the family of Dotenberg . Between 1375 and 1382 , Riems and Gristow became the possession of the city of Greifswald , which leased the then uninhabited island out as pasture land . After 1820 , the city built a homestead but sold it back to its previous tenant in 1883 . Riems is home to the oldest virological research institution in the world , now called the Friedrich Loeffler Institute , which was built by Friedrich Loeffler in 1910 . Loeffler , a professor at the University of Greifswald , ran filtration tests in 1898 and found that the dangerous foot - and - mouth disease was not a bacterium , but a previously unknown class he called " the smallest of all organisms " . He had determined it to be a virus . After investigations showed that Loeffler had inadvertently infected the whole region of Greifswald with foot - and - mouth disease he moved to the safer location of his institute on the island of Riems in 1910 . The Third Reich used the institute in Riems to research bioweapons . While East Germany controlled Riems approximately 800 people were working on vaccine research and development , today there are less than half that number . The population on the island is quite small . There are only 13 houses , five one - or two - family homes and eight apartment buildings , with a total of 62 residential units . Since 1997 , the research complex is the headquarters of the Riemser Friedrich - Loeffler - Institute ( FLI ) . The duties of the FLI include research on animal diseases , such as Bovine spongiform encephalopathy , foot - and - mouth disease and swine fever , and the development of preventive and protective measures against it , especially veterinary vaccines . As of 2006 , Riems was working on a vaccine for the avian flu . By 2010 , the Institute was to reduce their current locations Tübingen , Wusterhausen and Jena to just Jena and Riems . The total budget for the expansion work is some 150 million € . The construction needed to be handled carefully because of the historically rich old buildings . The former production plant for animal vaccines was successfully privatized as Riemser Arzneimittel AG . It has about 150 employees . After the 1990s the populated area in the western part of the island was freely accessible for some years . However , because of the renewed research work with viruses the island is again closed to the public . Quarantine stables and laboratories security levels are Level 4 . This means employees and visitors to the complex must change their clothes , and shower , when entering and exiting .