This article presents a fabrication process for soft x-ray zone plates in which nickel and germanium are combined to achieve high diffraction efficiency. A nickel zone plate is first fabricated on a germanium film and then used as a hardmask for a CHF3-plasma etch into the germanium. Zone plates with 50-60 nm nickel and 110-150 nm of germanium are presented. The measured diffraction efficiencies were 10%-11% at lambda=2.88 nm, which shows that high efficiency is possible even with thin nickel. Thus, the method has a potential for improving the efficiency of high-resolution zone plates for which the high-aspect-ratio structuring of nickel is difficult.