Operation Paperclip was not a fantasy. It wasn't nearly as
sinister as the
conspiracy wonks make it out to be; rather, it was a determined effort on the part of the
U.S. Military to gain a lead in the field of
military and civil
rocketry by nabbing as many
German scientists and engineers as possible who'd worked on such projects in
Nazi Germany and relocating them to the U.S. Their task was made easier by the fact that very few of the
German scientists wanted to be 'liberated' and thus
captured by the
Soviet Union, advancing from the East, and thus were generally eager to head
West.
A movie was made (sort of) about this, starring Kelly McGillis and Jeff Daniels, called The House on Carroll Street. It conflated McCarthyism and Nazi relocation, but ah well.
Werner von Braun and his staff and colleagues were Paperclip visa recipients. They went on to build the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Space Shuttle programs for NASA as well as much of the ICBM tech that went with those. The only real grey area seems to be whether or not any of these scientists avoided trials at Nuremberg by being part of Paperclip. It's unlikely the rocketry crew would have been charged, as many of them were essentially prisoners, and all had essentially worked as researchers and engineers. While slave labor was used to assemble finished products based on their designs (as well as prototypes), those laborers were under the direction of the Wermacht and SS, just as the scientists were.
When the allies and the Soviets were closing in on Germany, the SS attempted to destroy the work of the rocket scientists and disperse them so as to prevent either opposing nation from capturing them and their work. However, fortunately for the U.S., the local SS idea of 'destruction' was to toss all papers, notes, and other materials down a deep mine shaft near the rocketry center at Peenemunde. The scientists, captured by the U.S., assisted in the recovery of these materials in exchange for their relocation and protection. Their first job for the U.S. was sorting and reconstructing all of this work; that task was the official reason for (and end result of) Operation Paperclip. The name was chosen to represent the work - re-sorting and compiling scattered materials recovered from around Germany.