Zone transfer failure

[Amiga Hound]

I'm setting up a state-side DNS to be the new primary for a domain that
was initially set up in Germany. The German ISP won't forward the
request to DENIC until they can do a zone transfer from me. I tried to
do a zone transfer from another ISP to me using named at a debug level
of 3 and the debug file just shows the query with no results or error
messages. I checked the zone file a couple dozen times and found no
errors that I know about. The only thing that I can think of that would
be odd is that I want to try to use a .com DNS to host .de domain
records. Will this work or do I need to add records to the zone file to
list the DNS as part of the .de domain I'm trying to host?