Jan Zolcer was born in Czechoslovakia and emigrated to Germany in 1986.  

In 1988 he founded the Zolcer TV Filmproduction company.  Within three years the company had opened 20 offices in 20 countries worldwide, and one of Europe"s largest independent news agencies was established.
The company produced documentaries and reports and worked together with numerous media organizations, including  ZDF, CNN, NHK, Channel4, STV, Arte, NOS, ORF, RTL, SAT-1, RAI, and DW. Much of the companies productions were primarily from Eastern Europe.

Zolcer TV correspondent bureaus opened in the following cities - Moscow, Warsaw, Sofia, Bucarest, Tirana, Kiev, Vilnius, Prague, Bratislava, Budapest, Novisad, Zagreb, Stockholm, Helsinki, Cologne, Johannesburg, Washington, Jerusalem, and Istanbul.

For the autumn of 1999, one of the largest documentary enterprises in television history was made as a co-production between the German ZDF group and Zolcer TV. The series is called "100 years - 100 pictures - 100 events," and was a mammoth undertaking. 60 editors and countless researchers spent three years working on the 100 individual 10 minute episodes for the series, which has been published either partially or fully in 20 countries.

There are about 500 witnesses to different events including:
the last witness of the Titanic tragedy, Lenin's grandniece, Al Capone's grandnephew, the sons of Mussolini and Chaplin, a nurse from Pearl Harbor, Hitler's secretary, survivors of Auschwitz, the navigator of the Nagasaki bomber, the heroes of Mount Everest, an Apollo 11 astronaut, Edward Teller, Shimon Peres, Helmut Kohl, the Pope and Ali Agca, Lech Walesa, Otto Habsburg, George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev.