[1] Zülch was born in Liebau, in the Sudetenland, now Libina, Czech Republic.

As a boy he belonged to the Bündische Jugend, part of the German Youth Movement, in Hamburg.

[2] The Society for Threatened Peoples (German: Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker) grew out of this organization in 1970.

As of 2006[update], its German branch, GfbV-Deutschland, is one of the largest human rights organizations in Germany.

For example, in the early 1990s he was fined for breaking into a Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm warehouse in Munich to secure evidence of the company's covertly supplying the Iraqi air force;[4] he repeatedly protested Russia's military actions in Chechnya, comparing the bombing of Grozny to Dresden in 1945;[5][6] in 2005 in advance of the official visit of German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to Kaliningrad (formerly Königsberg, East Prussia) to celebrate the city's 750th anniversary, he demanded in an open letter that Schröder note the mass expulsions and deaths of Germans there and elsewhere in the former eastern territories of Germany under Stalin;[7] he protested the 2008 Summer Olympics in China on behalf of Tibet, comparing it to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin under the Nazis;[8] and he has been credited as one of those most responsible for the Sinti and Roma being recognized as a minority people in Germany.