inputTextHelp doesn't work with german Umlaute

Umlauts in the value and helpText attributes become rendered as HTML entities.
In this case the jsp files are stored in UTF-8 encoding (by the editor).
Here's the jsp head:
<%@ page pageEncoding="UTF-8" contentType="text/html;charset=UTF-8" language="java" %>

@html head:
<meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="content-type" />