UTF-8 encoding issues with Spring resourcebundle for special characters

I am using Spring ResourceBundle to retrieve a message bundle from my .properties file. It contains special European characters such as:

Ü, ß. ä, ö, ü

      

        
        
        
      

    

The MessageSouce bean is given below (I'm pretty sure UTF-8 encoding is respected)

    <bean id="messageSource"
      class="org.springframework.context.support.ReloadableResourceBundleMessageSource">
        <property name="basename" value="classpath:/META-INF/i18/messages" />
        <property name="defaultEncoding" value="UTF-8" />
    </bean>

      

        
        
        
      

    

When I try to get a message in my Java code, I get unwanted characters.

If I use below code it helps to recognize a few characters, but the rest are still displayed as

 return new String (bundleString.getBytes(), "UTF-8")

      

        
        
        
      

    

Then I used below to encode my properties file but still no effect

native2ascii -encoding utf8 resources.utf8 resources.properties

      

        
        
        
      

    

I also tried to manually open the properties file in Notepad ++ and set the encoding to UTF-8, but no effect. I see a post here having the same problem as mine. But the solution uses the PropertiesBundle property whereas I should only use the Spring solution. However, even the accepted answer in this link does not work for me and gives unnecessary characters.

Please suggest any possible solution.