They booked tickets for a passage on the ship MV Wilhelm Gustloff, which was due to depart on 13 January 1945, but at the last moment his grandmother changed her mind and took them to the railway station, where they boarded a train carrying wounded soldiers to Berlin.

[7] Czukay family resettled to Limburg an der Lahn, and when Holger was in his teens, moved to Duisburg, where he attended the Gerhard Mercator Scientific School and worked part-time in a radio and TV repair shop.

[11] In May 1966, Czukay resettled to St Gallen (Switzerland) taking up a lecturing post in music at the Institut auf dem Rosenberg.

One of his pupils, Michael Karoli,[12] familiered Czukay with the contemporary rock music, introducing him to The Beatles, Velvet Underground, and Frank Zappa.

During live performances Holger wore his signature white gloves using them while playing bass to protect his fingertips for tape editing, and also to absorb sweat.

[16] Czukay had been sidelined due to creative disputes and his failure to progress as a bassist, admitting his shortcomings on the instrument which he had taken up "almost by default" in the early days of Can.

One of his trademarks was the use of shortwave radio sounds and his early pioneering of sampling,[18] in those days involving the painstaking cutting and splicing of magnetic tapes.

[19] Czukay continued to work with the former members of Can: playing bass on Irmin Schmidt's soundtrack pieces released in Filmmusik Vol.2 (1981), recording Full Circle (1982) with Jaki Liebezeit,[20] and mastering Michael Karoli's debut album Deluge (1984).

[24] Holger Czukay was married for nearly thirty years to the German painter and singer Ursula Kloss (known professionally as Ursa Major, and later as U-She), with whom he collaborated on numerous multimedia pieces.