Born in Hasselfelde, he first came to public notice in 1931, when he began to work on the problem of transporting mail by rocket.
In 1934, he emigrated to the UK, where he attempted to interest the British government in his rocket.
After World War II, he moved across the border to West Germany, to the part of the Harz in Lower Saxony, where he became a furniture dealer.
This accident led to a ban on civilian rocket research in West Germany, ending the rocket experiments of the Hermann-Oberth-Gesellschaft (Hermann Oberth Society) and the Berthold Seliger Forschungs- und Entwicklungsgesellschaft mbH (Berhold Seliger Research and Development Society).
In October 2011, Canadian Wilfred Ashley McIsaac resurrected the Zucker legacy in eastern Ontario, Canada after launching a scale solid fuel ARCAS rocket with Gerhard Zucker 'First Canadian Rocket-Flight' stamps on board.