how to get the number of seconds passed since 1970 for a date value?

I have to an android application in which I need to convert the current date to the number of seconds passed since 1970.

What I am doing currently is this.

Calendar cal = new GregorianCalendar(TimeZone.getTimeZone("GMT"));
cal.set(currentDate.get(Calendar.YEAR), month, currentDate.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH), 0, 0, 0);
long timesince1970 = cal.getTime().getTime();

Another problem is that my application needs to run in Germany. Hence the need to convert the time to their time zone and then convert it to the number of seconds since 1970.

The above is not giving me correct results.

System.currentTimeMillis() gives you the number of milliseconds since the Unix epoch (January 1, 1970 00:00:00 UTC).

Divide it by 1000 to get the number of seconds.

//long currentTimeMillis ()-Returns the current time in milliseconds. 
long millis = System.currentTimeMillis();

//Divide millis by 1000 to get the number of seconds.
long seconds = millis / 1000;