Broda was strongly influenced by his uncle Georg Wilhelm Pabst, a famous film director, and Egon Schönhof, who returned to Austria as a convinced communist after serving time as a prisoner-of-war in Russia.

During that period, he was imprisoned several times but eventually Broda emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1938.: 95 After moving to the United Kingdom in 1938, Broda settled in England and was post-doctoral researcher at the University College London where he investigated the transformations of Light in chemical energy at the Medical Research Council on behalf of the University College London.

His major work as a scientist - Evolution of the Bioenergetic Processes - was published in 1975.: 95 [5] Broda became a member of the Pugwash Movement, in support of nuclear disarmament in 1947.

In 2019, Alexander Vassiliev, the Austrian-British journalist, accused Broda of conducting an espionage for the Soviet Union during his research time in the Cavendish Laboratory in England in a book based upon the evidences formerly undisclosed KGB archives.

[6] According to the book, the Soviet KGB reports from August 1943 suggest that Broda— codenamed: "ERIC"— was the main Russian source of information on the British side of the American-led Manhattan project at the earliest times.