With CW's 'Arrow' attempting to bolster its cast with new faces, the show recently ran into some negative speculation with the announcement of one of its new characters.

British actor Jimmy Akingbola was casted as Baron Blitzkrieg, a notorious comic book character from early iterations that depicted him as a Nazi.

This ofcourse brought further rumors, especially since Akingbola is a black man. The showrunners have since taken to EW to clear up there casting and reasoning. Marc Guggenheim first addresses the fact that Akingbola's race and the character's background are in no way related.

"We wanted a really great villain for Oliver in the flashbacks," Guggenheim explains. "We wanted to come out of the gate strong with someone great and we wanted to, quite frankly, cast the best actor. As it turns out, our best actor was African-American."

"We took the name Baron Reiter without any intention of turning him into Baron Blitzkrieg," he continues. "Baron Blitzkreig is the evil Nazi super villain. Baron Reiter is not going to become Baron Blitzkreig in the show."

This assures that Akingbola's character will not have the same story as the Blitzkrieg character. He goes on to explain what interested them in Baron.

We never planned on actually telling a story about a bad guy who is a Nazi," Guggenheim says. "In fact, when people meet this character, he's not German, he's not a Nazi, he doesn't subscribe to any Nazi philosophies. We were attracted to an organization that actually in the comics had been associated with Deathstroke called Shadowspire. In the comics, Baron Reiter became associated with Shadowspire."

Guggenheim then dropped an interesting detail on how Oliver's flashbacks will play out this season.

"We have a really great surprise for the season premiere for the flashbacks, and it's made talking about the flashbacks very difficult," he says. "We pick up basically in real time. It's been a number of months later since the last flashback. Oliver is in Coast City, as eagle-eyed viewers noted when he boarded the boat at the end of season 3. What happens there and how he comes to cross with Reiter, that we need to keep secret because it would spoil a pretty big twist in episode 401."