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This is a great question, and one that was actually debated. I have two parts to this post since I wrote a lot. I apologize for repetition in some parts. My reply to my own comment below is part 2.

Part 1:

I think, when we look at the totality of it, there are three fundamental reasons why the situation turned out as it did.

1. The wishes of Jews.

2. Demographics post-WWII.

3. The history of Zionism to that point.

To begin with, consider factor 1. The idea of returning to a state for Jews in formerly Germany, while appealing to those uninvolved, was anathema to Jewish populations. The mere idea of stepping foot in areas of Germany that had once held Jews was terrifying to many Jews, particularly Holocaust survivors. Much of the property that Jews had previously held was already taken and redistributed, which already posed an issue.

Perhaps one great example was the Exodus Affair. In July 1947, a ship carrying 4,500 displaced persons on the Exodus 1947 set out to land in Mandatory Palestine. The British intercepted the ship, boarded it 30 miles off the coast of Gaza, and forced the ship to submit (there was indeed fighting). 3 Jews died, 28 were wounded, and the British towed the ship to Haifa. They pulled off the dead and wounded there, and moved the bulk of the remainder to 3 separate ships, sending them back to France. Most of the passengers then refused to disembark, at which point the British towed them to Hamburg (Germany), and they were forcibly disembarked there. If the Jews had resisted the idea of disembarking in France, the idea of disembarking displaced persons in Germany was a scandal. The result was a public relations coup for Zionist groups who had made sure that they were not only on hand to record the event as best possible, but also to show UN Special Committee on Palestine members the events as they unfolded, to show the plight of Jews and justify the need for a Jewish state to them (they went on to propose the partition plan passed in the General Assembly in 1947 for a variety of reasons, but no doubt this was an effective emotional appeal).

The idea had already been anathema to Jews for a good amount of time. Ben-Gurion, Israel's essential founding father and first Prime Minister, toured the displaced persons camp at one point. As he did, one person asked him, "When will we get to Palestine?". Note the point: they asked him, the most prominent Zionist figure, not when they'd have a state, but when they'd get to Palestine. That was the goal for many of these people, to leave behind the horrors of the Holocaust and the Nazi party. So absurd was the idea that even in 1941, Ben-Gurion when asked by Lord Moyne how Jews would feel about a state in East Prussia, following the expulsion of Jews from there, he said it would take machine guns to force Jews to go there. Moyne argued that Ben-Gurion's proposal to integrate 3 million Jews into Palestine was not feasible, but Ben-Gurion was adamant. Chaim Weizmann, another one of Israel's most influential founding figures and its first President, spoke to UNSCOP in 1947 saying:

Therefore, in the face of this terrible fact, to advise us to turn again to live among the hatreds of the present and the tombstones of the past is asking too much from flesh and blood.

Admittedly, he was more discussing the prospect of living among the nations of Europe without a Jewish state. I think, though, that his words would aptly and equally apply to any Jewish state founded, almost literally, on the ashes of Europe's Jewry. And if you might permit me to explain one more quote that is striking, perhaps you can see precisely the emotion that even the Holocaust as an idea would hold for Jews, and how terrifying it would be to contemplate forcing them to have a state in Germany. Ben-Gurion, in his testimony to UNSCOP:

Can anybody realize what that means? What that means to us? Can one realize—a million Jewish babies burned in the gas chambers? A third of our people, almost as many as the whole population of Sweden, murdered?

The terrifying, horrifying nature of the Holocaust made the mere prospect of such a thing...abhorrent. The distaste of most Jews then should be obvious when you put it in that perspective, abstract and removed as the thought may seem now, 70 years later. Imagine knowing that a million Jewish babies, no different from perhaps your own baby or child, were burned or stabbed or shot wantonly and openly by a government and in communities nearby to where your state would be, or even perhaps in the area of a state granted to you.

The more research I did to brush up on how I'd answer this question, the more sickening the thought was. I don't say that to demean you: I have many a time contemplated this precise question, and even had a similar perspective going in, despite knowing the answer I'd give. It is only when you really put yourself in that mindset, I think, that you can understand the vehemence of Jewish opposition.

Anyways, I think I've gone past the need to discuss that further, so I'll move on.

The second and third point are quite tied, in my view. The change in European Jewish demographics as well as the history of the Zionist movement for a state until that point were crucial in the decision to not create such a state in Germany, or one of its conquered former territories. Prior to the Holocaust, Jews were concentrated in Europe, primarily its Eastern part (with Poland being the largest), though Jews were scattered throughout. In 1933, more than 60% of the world's Jews lived in Europe, if one includes portions of the Soviet Union's European portion in that count.

/u/ghostofherzl's answer is good, but it focuses on one specific element of this, namely why Jews migrating to Germany was really not a viable option. Obviously a Jewish homeland in Germany wasn't going to happen if there were no Jews willing to migrate there, but there are other factors that precluded this.

First, I think this question relies on the faulty assumption that Israel was created in the post-WW2 changing of large portions of the map, so that European powers could have a country for Holocaust refugees. That wasn't really the case. While refugees for the Holocaust gave proto-Israel leverage for European political support (both practically and in PR terms), fundamentally the drive to create Israel came from the Jewish nationalist movement of Zionism, which existed before the war. In many ways Israel was Zionism forcing the hand of European powers, not a decision they had made. European support amounted to support for the British no longer fighting against Jews immigrating to Israel and establishing a government there, but they did not actually take any steps to create Israel. So since no land was really "given to Jews to create their homeland", I think the whole assumption behind the question sort of falls apart.

But, we can discuss a bit why even if that had been the case, an actual Jewish homeland in Germany wouldn't have made sense. Many of these factors are discussed in ghostofherzl's comment.

First of all, the Jewish population in Europe was not all that big anymore, since most of them had been murdered. Because the surviving Jews had been forcibly moved around and were not in recognizable communities, there was no region that had a large Jewish population to begin with. And of course many of those survivors were not in Germany anyway. Creating this abstract Jewish homeland in Germany would've required completely starting from scratch, picking a place, sending all the Jews there, and either creating infrastructure from scratch or expecting Jews to do that. It also would've required land, presumably by appropriating it from Germans, which would've been touchy politically. Germany was a country that had been heavily damaged by decades of Nazi rule and a massive war sweeping through, and was not economically self-sufficient. That's not the sort of country that can support a mini-country in it composed solely of penniless refugees.

Contrary to popular belief, the whole of the German populace did not react in shock and horror at Nazism, and renounce everything that happened. While they were generally shocked and horrified by the details of it, Germany remained a deeply antisemitic place. Many Germans believed that even if what had happened was wrong, it was still in some sense driven by a Jewish threat to Germany. Many Germans feared Jewish reprisals. Taking German land and turning it into a country for Jewish refugees would not have played well. Additionally, the vast majority of Jewish refugees were not from Germany. Many had probably never been there before the war, and had no non-genocide-related interaction with Germans. Many didn't speak German, although most did speak Yiddish, which is similar enough to make learning one from the other relatively simple.

Israel, on the other hand, had a large Jewish population that had developed communal infrastructure, and was ideologically dedicated to welcoming Jewish immigration (the infrastructure and dedication were severely tested after independence, when enormous waves of Jews from the Middle East migrated to Israel). Many Jews had an ideological interest in moving there, but practically it had every conceivable benefit over this hypothetical Jewish homeland in Germany. It would've been unprecedented and extremely difficult to actually pull off.

But ignoring all the above, if it had actually happened, we're in deep hypothetical territory with the Israel-Palestine conflict. Obviously there's no way to know what would've happened, but the conflict was still under way before the war. There was a large Jewish population in Palestine which was invested in creating a Jewish state and an Arab population which was invested in that not happening. These two had been violently in conflict with each other and the British government in the region. While different political outcomes for European powers would've changed the calculus significantly, the basic ingredients for the conflict were present without Jewish refugees from Europe (which is why the conflict was already under way).