Spring cleverly treats http error codes as exceptions, and assumes that your exception handling code has the context to handle the error. To get exchange to function as you would expect it, do this:
try {
return restTemplate.exchange(url, httpMethod, httpEntity, String.class);
} catch(HttpStatusCodeException e) {
return ResponseEntity.status(e.getRawStatusCode()).headers(e.getResponseHeaders())
.body(e.getResponseBodyAsString());
}
This will return all the expected results from the response.