History

Grete Berger was born in what was then Imperial Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century. She was the daughter of Joseph Herbert Berger, the director of the Serological Institute in Vienna, and his wife Valerie. Due to health reasons the family moved to South Tyrol, where they opened a pharmacy in Meran.

Grete Berger followed her father’s steps and studied pharmacy in Vienna. However, love sneaked into her formulas when she met merchant Otto Broschek, whom she married in 1923. Otto worked in banks, publishing houses and, of course, in his father-in-law’s pharmacy in Meran. Years later, after the Second World War, the Berger family began manufacturing local anesthetics in special glass ampoules imported from Italy.

When Josef Herbert Berger died, Grete Berger and Otto Broschek took the reins of the business and made it prosper with the distribution of German pharmaceuticals on the other side of the Alps, in Italy. In 1926 the couple welcomed their son Herbert Broschek. All went well until the outbreak of World War II forced them to return to Vienna. There they found their family home destroyed, event that made them move to the city of Vorarlberg, fleeing from the Russian armies. They boarded a train with that destination, but chance held a different ending for their journey: the locomotive stopped near the small Tyrolean village of Fieberbrunn, unable to cross a bridge shattered by bombs. It was 1945.

The first generation of our Broschek founder took refuge in a farm room for three years. There was both famine and a shortage of medicines.

On December 1, 1947, the “Gebro G. Broschek KG” was founded in Fieberbrunn. The company name is an acronym in honor of the first pharmacist of the family, Grete Broschek. On the founding team were Herbert and his parents. Two years earlier, in 1945, Herbert Broschek’s entrepreneurial spirit had already translated into a stuffed animal factory. Those cloth animals were known as the Tiere mit Herz, “animals with hearts”.

Herbert followed his grandfather and his mother’s steps and studied Pharmacy in Innsbruck, where he met Helga Luger, also a pharmacist, whom he will marry eight years later. The family expanded to four: Grete, Otto, Herbert and Helga.

At “Gebro G. Broschek KG”, gender equality was pioneering back in the time. Women were in charge of the technical-scientific organization and men were into management. Otto died in 1978 and Grete in 1984. Herbert and Helga and their son Pascal, born in 1969, gave way to the next generational relay. Herbert and Helga died in 2009 and 2015 respectively. Pascal Broschek currently collects all this legacy as Chairman of the Gebro Holding.

That small laboratory in the Alps is now one of the most important pharmaceutical companies in Austria and a Holding with subsidiaries in Switzerland, Hungary and Spain. The company, a reference in the area of pain, closed 2022 with a turnover of 240M€ and currently employs around 500 people.