I have attached a test (which is not your adapted/modified test) which fails with 4.3.6 (did you test explicitly this tag?). Besides, I use only JPA calls and no Hibernate Sessions. As you can see, the EntityManager is application managed, although I am not sure whether that is relevant to the problem. If you still cannot reproduce the problem, I will provide you also the source code for my entities. Also I can confirm that no DELETE query is sent to the DB server.