After some research I found the answer to my problem.
The problem is that java.security.acl.Group is being deprecated since JRE 9 and marked for removal in future versions.
java.security.acl.Group is being replaced by java.security.Policy
I was running my Spring-Boot application on JRE 14 in which this class appeared to be no longer available.
So once I changed my Spring-boot application (which hosts the REST-API) to use JRE 11 the error went away.
Note: The pom.xml Java version attibute
<java.version>11</java.version>
needed to change as well as the JDK in the build path in Eclipse (which is the IDE I’m using) JDK Buildpath