I ran the bitbake process a second time, and now it succeeded.
I guess that some interruptions of the first build process somehow led to inconsistent build caches.
For example git-lfs was missing (but this was detected right at the beginning of the build process, so I don‘t think this was the culprit).
So I went through the b2qt build instructions once again.
But this time
I updated the required software packages using
$> sudo apt-get install gawk curl git-core diffstat unzip p7zip-full texinfo
gcc-multilib build-essential chrpath libsdl1.2-dev xterm gperf bison
g++-multilib
This resulted in some software packages being added and some existing being upgraded
I ran bitbake from a virtual console
I am running xubuntu 16.04 LTS and recently my desktop sessions sometime have been closed, when bitbake ran for a while. So I decided not to run bitbake from a GUI terminal, but from a virtual text console.
I created a new build environment from scratch
I created a new directory for the b2qt build environment and ran the b2qt-init-build-env script from there. So I was sure there was no old stuff laying around.
As already said, „$> bitbake b2qt-embedded-qt5-image“ then successfully built the image.
Problem solved.