This little excerpt from the bash man page explains the reason I just wasted 2 hours:

Note that the order of redirections is significant.  For example, the command ls > dirlist 2>&1 directs both standard output and standard error to the file dirlist, while the command ls 2>&1 > dirlist directs only the standard output to file dirlist, because the standard error was duplicated as standard output before the standard output was redirected to dirlist.