A: 

IMO, the easiest way to implement a soft-delete would be to add a flag in your entities and to use:

  • the @SQLDelete annotation to override the default Hibernate delete (and perform an update of the flag)
  • the @Where (or @Filters?) annotation on your entities and associations to filter the deleted entities

Not sure how this can fit with your Auditing table though. Some further exploration and testing are required.

Resources

Pascal Thivent