Hi Steve,
thanks a lot for pointing at the problem, you guessed the right fact.
I had a look on the files on another PC with notepad++ - the coding of all files was ANSI.
I saved them another time with my systems notepad as utf-8 - and got ansi again (maybe due to all characters belong to the ansi charset).
Now I swapped my editor to notepad++ and mkgmap runs as expected. I'm happy :-)
Thanks