sqlite utf8 encoding error

[Greg Miller]

I have an application that uses sqlite3 to store job/error data.  When
I log in as a German user the error codes generated are translated into
German.  The error code text is then stored in the db.  When I use the
fetchall() to retrieve the data to generate a report I get the
following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "c:\Pest3\Glosser\baseApp\reportGen.py", line 199, in
OnGenerateButtonNow
    self.OnGenerateButton(event)
  File "c:\Pest3\Glosser\baseApp\reportGen.py", line 243, in
OnGenerateButton
    warningresult = messagecursor1.fetchall()
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode bytes in position 13-18:
unsupported Unicode code range

does anyone have any idea on what could be going wrong?  The string
that I store in the database table is:

'Keinen Text für Übereinstimmungsfehler gefunden'

I thought that all strings were stored in unicode in sqlite.

Greg Miller